How Many Sales Have You Made After Your Advertising Campaign?
by Radhika Venkata
When you start your online business, you will go through a series of steps like: ==>Domain registration ==>Website designing and installing your inventory and order links ==>Advertising about your products or service
Regarding advertising, you should always target your audience.When you are selling garden tools in Miami, you will get better results with offline advertising and Joint Ventures with other websites that are focused on Gardening and pointing to Miami area.
After Advertising, one important step is 'TESTING' your advertising campaign.
Why?
Look at this example.You spent $50 on keeping an ad on some famous site or a email campaign.Let's say this is one time ad.
If you don't know how many people clicked on your URL or how many people bought your product coming through that link, how are you going to spend another $50 on the same advertising method?
Rather than Click thrus you can go one step further and calculate the number of sales per one advertising method.
Here are few methods you can use to track your results.
**1.Email Tracking:
If you have ezine and you are keeping your subscription email links in different places like other ezines, websites and ebooks, you can give a little code to your email address.
Like this-
subscribe@yourdomain.com?subject=ezine
subscribe@yourdomain.com?subject=ebook
First one in ezines and second one in your ebook.That little code goes in to subject area of emails.
By seeing your emails you can know from where you are getting more response.
**2.URL Tracking:
There are different ways to track your URLs.
You can keep your URL with a little code similar to emails.
www.yourdomain.com/product.html?source=ebook
You can also upload a different page for your each ad campaign.See the example below.
You have a page like- www.yourdomain.com/product.html
Then you can upoload the same page with different URL like- www.yourdomain.com/prod.html
So the visitors that comes to that page can be seen in your weblogs.If you have a good logging software you can save all the visitors information for that particular page.Check this weblogger-
http://www.logitpro.com/
http://perlonline.com/
This weblogger tells you exactly how many hits are taking by one webpage and referers.
So you can see how many hits are coming to your '/prod.html' page and referers.
**3.Click Tracking Software:
Click tracking script is a cgi script that gives you information about a click. The click may be on your website, emails, ezines, banners or anything.
If the click tracking script tells you the number of clicks it is not going to be useful to you. Because you can't differentiate the people buying through your campaign links or your regular links.
So what a Click tracking script should tell you?
1. Tell the number of clicks to tell the click thru ratio:
By this you can optimize your ads. If a specified ad get low click thrus you can change the optimize it.
2. Tell the ip address of the visitor.
By this you can know which ad bringing you the sales. If a particular ip clicking on a specific link buys your product you can know that ad campaign's ROI.
3. Tells the geographical distribution of the clicks.
This is useful when you want to know how many clicks coming from different countries. Like if you see 'jp' with ip address, you can know the visitor from Japan. But this is not possible in all cases.
http://www.scripts4webmasters.com/clicktracking/index.shtml
This is a FREE Click tracking script that gives you all needed information. It comes with easy admin panel.
IMPORTANT TIPS IN TESTING YOUR ADs:
==>If you think your URL is 'Alive', don't delete that page on your server.
If you keep an ad in your ezine articles and submit to other ezines, your articles will be spread all over the net after a while.If you delete that URL on your server people will get '404 page not found' error and you will lose your potential visitor.
==>In email campaigns consider short URLs.Long URLs will break up in to two lines and the reader can not click on it to get your desired page.
==>Test ONE VARIABLE at a time.Suppose you want to check the response and sales rate for two different types of sales letter and by giving free gifts with your product. Don't test both at once. First check the sales page variable.If you don't get good response then go to free gifts variable.
If you get good response to one of the sales pages, then use the free gifts method in different advertising campaign.
Good luck!!
About The Author
Radhika Venkata - Subscribe to 'EbookBiz Magazine' which is completely focused on ebook business and Internet Marketing. Receive FREE Ebooks with Resale rights every month!
http://www.ebooks-world.com/freetosell.shtml
Webmaster Resources: List Your product, ezine or web site free! http://www.webmasters-central.com/
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
More Website Advertising Articles
More By Developer Shed
developerWorks - FREE Tools! |
IBM Enterprise Modernization solutions help organizations evolve core IT systems towards modern architectures and technologies—reducing the burden of maintenance and freeing up resources to develop new business requirements and capabilities. With the IBM Enterprise Modernization Sandbox for System z you can evaluate IBM Enterprise Modernization solutions focused on five key areas: Assets, Architectures, Skills, Processes and Infrastructures, and Investment. Each solution is based upon real customer experiences and offers a proven path to get you started with your modernization projects. FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Secure your Web applications with IBM Rational AppScan Standard Edition V7.7, previously known as Watchfire AppScan. This Web application security testing tool automates vulnerability assessments and scans and tests for common Web application vulnerabilities. Visit IBM developerWorks to download a free trial of IBM Rational AppScan Standard Edition V7.7. FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
XML has become a common way of storing business data as flat files and many data server vendors including IBM have provided ways to store this data within relational database systems. Increasingly collections of XML files are accessed like databases using an xQuery and other XML standard mechanisms. Businesses find the need to combine the traditional tabular structured data with XML formatted data. In this webcast, you’ll learn about IBM’s WebSphere Federation Server technology, which provides users with the ability to integrate these two data formats. FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Join this Rational Talks to You teleconference on December 11 at 1:00 pm ET to get tips on building your own plugins with Rational Method Composer. Get your questions answered! FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Join this Rational Talks to You teleconference on November 29 at 1:00 pm ET to participate in an interactive discusssion with Grady Booch around architecture and reuse. Get your questions answered! FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) Express Edition offers outstanding online transaction processing (OLTP) database performance, while helping to simplify and automate many of the tasks associated with deploying databases for small business applications. IDS 11 further extends the ease of management and applications integration with the Admin API and Scheduler, high availability with Continuous Log Restore for backup server recovery in case of a primary server failure, and column level encryption to protect personal and company private data. FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Get a free trial download of the latest version of IBM Rational Performance Tester V7.0.1, a load and performance testing solution for teams concerned about the scalability of their Web-based applications. Combining multiple ease-of-use features with granular detail, Rational Performance Tester simplifies the test-creation, load-generation and data-collection processes that help teams ensure the ability of their applications to accommodate required user loads. FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Attend this launch webcast with Scott Hebner, Vice President of IBM Rational Marketing and Strategy, where he will overview Rational’s new offerings and programs to help customers accelerate software innovation on System z. He will discuss how these solutions help organizations extend their core business processes toward modern architectures such as SOA and web technologies to deliver business improvements that stand the test of time. FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
In this webcast, IBM Rational will discuss the importance of Web application security and will share techniques and best practices to introduce application security testing into current QA processes including: understanding common security vulnerabilities and techniques to integrate security testing with defect tracking and remediation systems in an effort to safeguard sensitive online information. FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Join this webcast to learn how IBM Rational's Functional Testing solution enables you to implement automation your way, at your pace, with your existing staff. In this webcast, you’ll learn how you can eliminate redundancy of manual test scripts, reduce errors, and increase test coverage through test automation. After this presentation you will understand how IBM Rational Functional Testing solution can streamline your manual testing and make test automation easily attainable. FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
All FREE IBM® developerWorks Tools! |