Unveiling the Hidden Techniques of Monitoring Your Ad Campaigns

The Importance of Tracking Your Advertising Efforts

When you advertise in ezines, post in newsgroups, or leave your signature file anywhere, it's crucial to monitor the impact of your efforts. This practice has been a staple in direct marketing since its inception. If you've ever watched TV infomercials, you might have noticed that payment information often includes a specific department number or instructs you to call a particular extension. This strategy allows advertisers to identify where their customers and prospects are coming from. You can easily adopt these techniques to determine the most cost-effective advertising methods for your business.

A Simple and Free Way to Track Your Ads

Let's say you're running three ads for the same product in three different ezines. The product is sold from a single page on your website, for example, http://www.yourdomain.com/sales.html. If every ad points to this URL, you won't know which ad or ezine generated the sales. To track your ads, you can add a question mark and a unique code at the end of each URL, like this:

• sales?ezine1
• sales?ezine2
• sales?ezine3

You can create any code you want, as long as you remember which code corresponds to which ad. This strategy isn't limited to ezine advertising; you can use it in your discussion forum posts, your signature file, or anywhere else you promote your site, both online and offline. It's advisable to keep a record of which code matches which ad, as it can be challenging to keep track of all your ads. For instance, you can use Microsoft Excel to maintain a spreadsheet record of all your advertising efforts.

Understanding Server Logs

Your webserver won't recognize the question mark (?) code, but your server logs will. This is the key. All visitors will land on the same page (sales.html), but your logs will indicate the sales that came from each unique ad. This information will help you make an informed decision about which ezines to continue advertising in and which ones aren't worth your investment of time and money.

Your server logs record every URL that was entered (or clicked on) to reach your site. Whenever people order, you can check your server logs and match the time they ordered to the time that hits to your sales page were received using the unique code. This will help you identify which ad generated the sale.

If you don't have access to your server logs or don't know how to use them, there are many free and inexpensive stat tracking solutions available on the internet that are easy to understand and implement. One highly recommended solution is Sitegauge.

Determining the Effectiveness of Your Ads

In the offline world, advertising effectiveness is measured in response rate, which refers to how many people responded to your ad. Responses could mean click-throughs, sales, or even subscriptions to your ezine. You need to decide which response is valuable to you. Are you trying to increase traffic, boost sales, or simply capture email addresses for future follow-ups?

Since we're discussing sales in this article, you need to determine how many visitors it takes to make a sale. If an ad brought in 100 visitors and resulted in 4 sales, then you have a 25% response rate. That's quite impressive. You would then want to continue running the ad in the ezine that yielded that response rate until you notice a significant drop.

What you've just learned is the key to cost-effective advertising. When done efficiently, advertising becomes an exact science rather than a guessing game. This is scientific advertising at its best!

P.S. An even simpler (though not free) way of tracking ads is to purchase affiliate software and use it to track your ads by manually assigning each ad a unique affiliate id. This is very simple to do and can be set up quite easily.