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The Secrets Profits Hidden in Tracking Your Ads
By Steven Chabotte
©2004 All Rights Reserved
You've heard it said before and will probably hear it said again. "Placing advertising without a way to track results is like throwing money down the toilet."
Sure, you might invest $1000 in advertising and generate $3000 in sales with a net in your pocket of $1000 after all costs - and that is pretty good. It means you are making money.
But suppose that money is spread out over 10 different e-zines and banner rotations. Do you know what part of that $1000 is productive? Suppose only $200 of that amount was actually pulling in revenues for you. That means you are unproductively investing $800 either in the wrong places or with the wrong messages.
Wouldn't you like to invest that wasted $800 in a manner that enhances your cash flow rather than just benefitting someone else?
Well, you can do that with ad tracking. By setting up a good ad tracking system (preferably in an automated manner), you can start looking at how well a particular ad pulled in a particular publication. That information will allow you to make future decisions about both the ad and the publication.
Lets start with the mechanical aspects of tracking ads and then get into the information you can glean from the statistics you gather.
Lets take a look at a typical (and make believe) ad.
WIDGETS FOR SALE - BLOWOUT PRICING
Come visit my website at LINK to get your bargain pricing or send an email to EMAIL to have full details delivered to your mailbox in seconds.
This ad offers two opportunities to collect tracking data. The first is the email address and the second is the link. Lets look at each of them to see how they can benefit you.
LINK - The link is a clickable web address where the customer will be taken when clicking on it. This link will (eventuslly) lead to your offer page. If you are only running a single ad in a single publication, you can probably have it just go to the home page of your web site. But suppose you are running the same ad in twenty publications. How do you know where your traffic is coming from?
The only way is to use different "keyed" links. There are three methods that you can use for this purpose. The first is the ? style link where you put a ? and a number after the question mark.
http://www.maxsponder.com?12345 is an example of this style of link. The 12345 is a code to represent a specific publication. When someone clicks on this link, it will bring that person to your home page - but the statistics your web server keeps will see this as a unique page. This means when you do your web traffic analysis, you will see how many times this particular instance of your home page was accessed.
The second way is to use separate start pages on your website (i.e. page1.htm, page2.htm, etc.) And again this all rolls back into your server statistics data set and can be analyzed when you run your logs.
The third, and best, way is to use an ad tracking system that keeps the statistics for you in an easy to analyze control panel so only the relevant data is available to you.
http://www.maxsponder.com/cgi-bin/t.cgi?k=sales:1 is an example of such a link. In this instance, it is calling a program on our domain and telling it to look in a data table to see where the final page is and redirects the visitor to that final page. Just like the example above, this link brings folks to the home page of the site. The difference is that the statistics on this clickthrough are kept in a program that allows for easy analysis of just the data I am tracking rather than having to sift through a complete log of data for my entire web site.
EMAIL - Email is your other tracking tool when placing ads. Ideally, each email would be coded. There are three ways to do this.
First, if you have your own domain, you could set up a different email address for every ad that you place.
Second, if you have just one email address, you could program your ads with different subject lines so you can sort the emails as they come in. This method isn't super reliable though as many people will just type in your email address or it might not process properly in some email clients, etc.
Third, you could use a series of autoresponders. Many domains have a simple built in autoresponder system. And there are several 3rd party products and services that provide this functionality. The advantages of this method are two-fold. First, the customer gets a reply right away. Second, you know how many customers responded because the system will build you a mailing list from the respondents (which is a sort of nice bonus for follow-up activities.)
Now that you have an understanding of the two methods of tracking your ads on the internet, lets look at several reasons you want to track your ads.
- 1) You want to measure the effectiveness of a particular wording of an ad.
- 2) You want to measure the effectiveness of one publication vs another for a particular wording of an ad.
- 3) You want to test the effectiveness of one headline over another.
- 4) You want to test the effectiveness of one offer over another.
- 5) You want to measure the number of leads generated by each ad.
- 6) You want to measure the profitibilty of each ad. This one is a bit tricker as it involves more than just tracking clickthrough. You actually need to measure the conversion ratio and a real easy way to do that is to use an associate program script and set up different associate accounts, one for each ad. This will let you measure sales per ad. And with knowing the number of leads generated by an ad and the number of sales generated by an ad, you can accurately measure your pRofitibility for each ad. Without this figure, the best you will be able to get is a general conversion rate (say one sale per 50 customers) and use that information to just advertise in the places that give you the highest number of visitors.
From this brief introduction, you can now understand the difference between just guessing how you are doing in business and KNOWING how you are doing in business. The internet offers a wonderful array of powerful and inexpensive tools to let you track your business data on autopilot in ways that even major corporations could not do even a few years ago.
By knowing exactly the effect of every advertising dollar you invest, you can fine tune your business and dramatically increase your bottom line.
Happy tracking!
STEVEN CHABOTTE
is president of Big-Web Development Corp, a company specializing in the development of ad tracking, email productivity and marketing tools for the web. Steven can be reached at webmaster@maxsponder.com or you can visit our website at
http://www.maxsponder.com
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