Track Your Advertising Or Perish...

Track Your Advertising Or Perish...Copyright 2002 lessworkmoremoney.com By Armand MelansonHave you ever tried to find a light switch in a darkenedroom? You grope around helplessly hoping to find the switch.This is a good metaphor for the way many businesses managetheir e-marketing - they are groping around in the dark... The key to advertising is having metrics on the resultsyour 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.htmlhttp://www.extreme-dm.com racking/ http://www.webstat.com/ These are free services which allow you to embed a snippetof code in your webpages. This code gathers stats on yourtraffic 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 yourun will point back at a unique page you setup for it. Whenever someone clicks on an a link that points to thispage, a "hit" is counted in your stats. Of course, thispage doesn't have much on it as you want the visitor to beredirected to your real website main page ASAP. That's whatthe META-REFRESH tag does. Here is what the ad trackingpage should look like: you are being redirected - if not click here href="http://lessworkmoremoney.com">lessworkmoremoney.comyou 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 webstatscounted 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 content=0 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 elseyou'll be redirecting to my site. On second thought, leaveeverything just as it is in the sample code above [grin]... Whenever you place ads, you copy the tracking page & giveit a unique name that is associated with the ad you areplacing - if you are placing an ad in XYZ ezine, you couldname the page xyz.htm - and then make your ad link pointback to the page. In this case the ad link would be:http://your_site.com/xyz.htm. When someone clicks on the ad, the click is tracked & youcan determine whether the ad paid off or not. For example,if you spend $50 on an ezine top sponsor ad, you will wantto 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 itto generate 2 sales & a $10 profit. If you are not countingthe clicks on each of your ads, you have no way of knowingwhat's working or not. You won't even know how many peopleresponded 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 anotherad 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 emarketingconsultant & author. For free marketing tips & articles youcan re-use, visit him at http://lessworkmoremoney.com----------------------------------------------------