Track Your Advertising Or Perish...
Copyright 2002 lessworkmoremoney.com
By Armand Melanson
Have you ever tried to find a light switch in a darkened
room? You grope around helplessly hoping to find the switch.
This is a good metaphor for the way many businesses manage
their e-marketing - they are groping around in the dark...
The key to advertising is having metrics on the results
your advertising campaigns produce.
Here is a great adtracking tool I highly recommend:
ADMINDER - http://www.adminder.com/c.cgi?itworks&adminder
If you want to track your visitors from initial visit right
through to the sale, you will need to use ad & sales tracking
software like Adminder. I recommend using full strength tracking
because it gives you the feedback you need to evaluate your
marketing effectiveness.
Using this software, you create a distinct ad campaign for each
& every advertising effort. This allows you to precisely measure
how many clicks/sales you are getting from each ad. Without this
info, you cannot calculate ROI & determine whether or not a given
ad is profitable or not. For $10-$15/MO, it is definitely worth it.
If you are really trying to scrimp here's a way to track the
clickthrus on your ads ( you can't track sales without one of
the tools above ):
Sign up for free website tracking at one of these:
http://www.addfreestats.com/index.html
http://www.extreme-dm.com racking/
http://www.webstat.com/
These are free services which allow you to embed a snippet
of code in your webpages. This code gathers stats on your
traffic in real-time & can be checked via your browser.
You then create a webpage for each ad you want to track &
place it in the www folder of your website. Each ad you
run will point back at a unique page you setup for it.
Whenever someone clicks on an a link that points to this
page, a "hit" is counted in your stats. Of course, this
page doesn't have much on it as you want the visitor to be
redirected to your real website main page ASAP. That's what
the META-REFRESH tag does. Here is what the ad tracking
page should look like:
urlhttp://lessworkmoremoney.com">
you are being redirected - if not click here
href"http://lessworkmoremoney.com">lessworkmoremoney.com
you place the code snippet as directed by the webstat company here
You can see what this looks like in action by going here:
http://lessworkmoremoney.com/ez1.htm
As you can see, you got bumped to my main page. My webstats
counted the hit & I know that someone clicked on the link (i.e. they
responded to my ad). I slowed down the redirect so you could see
the message (I AM TRACKING THIS HIT RIGHT NOW), but you
should leave the content0 as is - this means that it waits 0
seconds prior to redirecting to the URL you specify.
Make sure you change the URL to your own site or else
you'll be redirecting to my site. On second thought, leave
everything just as it is in the sample code above [grin]...
Whenever you place ads, you copy the tracking page & give
it a unique name that is associated with the ad you are
placing - if you are placing an ad in XYZ ezine, you could
name the page xyz.htm - and then make your ad link point
back to the page. In this case the ad link would be:
http://yoursite.com/xyz.htm.
When someone clicks on the ad, the click is tracked & you
can determine whether the ad paid off or not. For example,
if you spend $50 on an ezine top sponsor ad, you will want
to know if it was worth it. To figure it out, do this:
If your conversion rate is 2% & your avg. sale is $30,
then you will likely need 100 clicks on your xyz ad for it
to generate 2 sales & a $10 profit. If you are not counting
the clicks on each of your ads, you have no way of knowing
what's working or not. You won't even know how many people
responded to the ad!
If you are serious about your business, you cannot afford
to mickey mouse around with the cheapskate approach I just
explained - you really should be using ADMINDER or another
ad tracker.
But if you're like me, you learn the hard way. Try the free
approach until you realize that you have to track right
through to the sale, then sign-up with ad tracking software.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Armand Melanson is an emarketing
consultant & author. For free marketing tips & articles you
can re-use, visit him at http://lessworkmoremoney.com
About the Author
Armand Melanson is an emarketing
consultant & author. For free marketing tips & articles you
can re-use, visit him at http://lessworkmoremoney.com