Tracking Responses To Promotions
            by James Graham

Have you given enough thought to exactly how your going to realize the effectiveness of your promotions?

Sure, if your only running a single advert in one ezine for 3 weeks the resulting surge in traffic could be fairly obvious.

Of course this scenario is very much a fairy tale, chances are you will be running more than one type of promotion in parallel.

Providing everything is going swell, low and behold your server logs start reflecting this immense flow of visitors to your site.

Assuming your promotions are targeted accurately and the advert is good you will be whooping with joy as the orders come flooding in.

Shortly after the champagne dries up comes the question:

'Where are all these visitors coming from?'

At this point I ask you to pick up a newspaper and glance through the trade classified adverts, notice anything?

Chances are each will be coded specifically to enable the advertiser a means of identifying the source of the advert your responding to when telephone or write for information.

If your asked to phone a certain number the advert may request you quote a unique reference to take advantage of the offer advertised. Similarly, addresses may include the return address coded with something like 'ref:AZ-0698' or 'Dept. AM1-698'.

Either way, the advertiser is identifying the success of the particular promotion by recording where the responses are coming from.

If you haven't guessed yet I'm going to show you how you can do the same thing for your on-line promotions.

As with most things, there is a hard and easy way to achieve this:

The hard way:

1. For each promotion or advert create a unique page which redirects the visitor automatically to your home page.
2. Match this unique URL to the current banner, signature or whatever medium you are using.

The obvious drawback to this technique is the time you have to take out to prepare a page and then duplicate it each time you run a different advert or try a new signature.

The easy way:

1. Uniquely identify each URL with a special code which relates to the particular signature, advert, banner that your using. This can be achieved by appending a question mark (?) after the URL and your code of choice.
2. For each promotion create a unique code to identify the source of traffic

For an email update I send to clients in June I could use:

1. http://www.gumball-tracker.co.uk/index.htm?upd6 and
2. http://www.gumball-tracker.co.uk/index.htm?led

for posts to Link Exchange Digest.
Upon examination of your server logs hopefully you will see lots of references to index.htm?upd6 or whatever you used.

Using this technique for every promotion undertaken will give you a much better understanding of how effective each individual promotion is performing and more importantly exactly how what the response in relation to the cost of the promotion.

Good luck!

James Graham

JAMES GRAHAM: is the driving force behind the Gumball Website Tracker, the original server log server for professional website owners.

FREE server logs for any site, anywhere. Track visitors: arriving, browsing, downloading and leaving your website. Register now! http://www.gumball-tracker.co.uk/?art3

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