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://www.logitpro.com/)
http://perlonline.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
(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!!

Craig Valine is the publisher of the The AwfulMarketing Alert
Newsletter, "Where you learn GOOD marketing strategies by
looking at those who do it really BAD."

To subscribe his free newsletter, go to: http://awfulmarketing.
com/ezinesubscribe.htm (http://awfulmarketing.com/
ezinesubscribe.htm)