If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Open Ads - Open Source Ad Inventory Management
The Big List of Affiliate Marketing Events
Secret To Get On The First Page Of Google

Any type of advertising that you do on the Internet can and should be tracked. If you don’t track where your traffic comes from and whether it converts, you’re basically throwing a bunch of spaghetti on the wall and hoping that some of it will stick!

It doesn’t matter HOW you advertise, what I would like to stress here is that you should be tracking. There are a myriad of options for advertising your business. There’s PPC, ezine advertising, email marketing, buying ads on websites, affiliate networks, and more.

You’ve heard of the Pareto principle or the 80/20 principle. This applies to your online advertising as well. 20% of your effort will result in 80% of your profits. The numbers may be different - 90/10 or even 95/5 - but the principle that a small amount of your effort will bring the majority of the results hold. This is usually applied to personal development but I want to focus here on advertising your business.

Tracking basically allows you to identify which 20% you should focus more of your effort on. In each area of advertising, you will see the 80/20 principle at work. Let’s say you’re doing PPC - 20% of your keywords may be bringing 80% of the traffic and conversions. If you’re advertising in ezines, 20% of the ezine ads you place may result in 80% of the opt-ins you’re getting. See the trend here?

Once you have the results from tracking, you can use Pareto charts to figure out where you should concentrate your efforts.

Now, if you’re able to track, then you can also TEST. After you’ve found the 20%, you can split test within that 20% to see which ad copy or offer works better.

Another example is in banner advertising. If you run banners on your website or blog, it’s best to use a rotator to show different banners to different visitors. After you’ve collected a significant number of impressions and clicks, you can evaluate the results and determine which banner to pull out. You can also rotate different banners going to the same offer. One way to do this is with OpenX (formerly Open Ads) which is an open source ad management system.

The same goes for email marketing. If you have a large enough list, you should be split-testing your messages. You can partition your list and send 50% of the list one message and 50% another. Then you can measure the response or the clickthrough rates and determine which email copy worked better. Aweber lets you do this type of message split-test easily. But the click tracking in Aweber shows you a really ugly URL. A better way to do it would be to use a different tracker to track the clicks coming from the email messages. The script that I personally use is currently off the market but I’ll let you know when the new version comes out.

Some people even claim that the 80/20 principle is dead but based on my own testing and tracking, it is very much alive!

Technorati Tags: Pareto principle, 80/20 principle, testing and tracking

Popularity: 5% [?]