Marc Goldman

The Secret Methods of Tracking Your Advertising

When you are placing ads in ezines or posting to newsgroups or leaving your sig file
anywhere, you should be tracking the effectiveness of your efforts. People have been
tracking their advertising efforts since the beginning of direct marketing. If you are a fan
of the tv infomercials, you would have noticed that when the payment information is
displayed, it always includes a particular Department number or instructs you to call a
particular extension number. This tells the advertiser where their customers and
prospects are coming from. You can easily implement these tricks yourself so that
you can determine what the most cost effective methods of advertising are for you.

Here is a simple and free way to track your ads. Lets say you are running 3 ads for
the same product and placing those ads in 3 different ezines. The product is sold from
one page on your website called:
http://www.yourdomain.com/sales.html

If you had every ad point to that URL, you would never know which ad worked or which
ezine brought in the sales. Therefore, you could track your ads by doing this:

Place a question mark and some code at the end of each URL. For example:

sales?ezine1
sales?ezine2
sales?ezine3

You can make the code whatever you want as long as you remember which code you
chose for the particular ad. Just remember this does not only apply to ezine
advertising, you could use this in your discussion forum posts or in your sig file or
anywhere else that you choose to promote your site, both online and offline. I suggest
keeping a record of which code matches which ad as it can be quite confusing
keeping track of all your ads. For example, I use Microsoft Excel to keep a
spreadsheet record of all of my advertising efforts.

Your webserver will not recognize the question mark (?) code but your server logs will.
This is the key. People will all end up on the same page (sales.html) but your logs will
indicate the sales that came from each unique ad. This will allow you to make an
informed decision about which ezines to continue to place ads in and those that aren't
worth your investment of time and money.

Your server logs record every URL that was entered (or clicked on) to get to your site.
Whenever people order, you can go to 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 to determine which ad brought in the sale.

If you do not have access to your server logs or you do not 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. Here is one that we highly recommend
using: Sitegauge

How will you determine which ads were effective? In the offline world, advertising is
measured in response rate. This means how many people responded to your ad
(responded could mean clickthrus, sales or even subscribers to your ezine). You have
to decide which of the possible responses is valuable to you. Are you trying to get
more traffic, more sales or simply capture email addresses so you can follow up at a
later date?

Since we are talking about sales in this article, you have to determine how many
visitors it takes before you get a sale. If an ad brought in 100 visitors and you had 4
sales, then you have a 25% response rate. That is quite amazing. You would then
want to keep running the ad in the ezine that brought you that response rate until you
see the rate start to drop dramatically.

What you have just learned is the key to cost effective advertising. Advertising, when
performed efficiently is like an exact science instead of a guessing game. This is
scientific advertising at it's best!

P.S. An even simpler (albeit 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.

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