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

The beauty of internet marketing is that every ad you place can be tracked. For example, you can track your pay-per-click (PPC) ads down to the level of the keywords that the searcher typed in to find your ad. Moving on a step further, you can track the resulting sale coming from that click. It is also important for you to know what your return on investment (ROI) is for your advertising campaign.

In the realm of newspaper or magazine classified ads, you will often find that advertisers will use a different department number for each ad. They use the same mailing address but add a different department code. In this way, they can track how different ads perform based on the inquiries they get sent to the different departments. This works also for the 800 numbers that you call to obtain more information. Companies can set up different toll-free numbers used for each ad and that is how they can track the effectiveness of different ad campaigns.

In offline advertising, it is much more expensive to set up the tracking. Imagine the costs associated with setting up different phone numbers or multiple P.O. boxes. In the online world, however, tracking becomes inexpensive as you can do it using a variety of scripts or software programs. With PPC advertising, you can easily use a simple PHP script to enable you to capture the keywords coming from a Google search referral.

Let’s take a look at another example. With many web hosting packages, you are allowed to set up multiple email addresses. You can set it up so that in each ad you use a different email address. Then when you get an email inquiry to a specific email address, you will know where that originated from. You can also set up different subdomains to use as the link in your ads. For example, if you are advertising in newsletters or e-zines, you can duplicate the same ad copy but send the readers to a separate subdomain as the URL for each ad.

When you are able to track the efforts of all your advertising, you can sit down at the end of the month and figure out which campaigns are generating the best ROI. You can then scale up those campaigns or tweak them to try to maximize your profits. If you are not tracking, then you are simply flying blind and you are depending more on chance. Start tracking your advertising efforts today.

Technorati Tags: tracking advertising, tracking and testing

Popularity: 7% [?]