Let's say you wanted to promote one of your products by
placing a classified ad in someone's ezine. How would you know if it was
a successful ad or not?
You could watch your sales and see if you got some extra
sales when the ezine came out, but how would you know for sure if the ad
pulled in more sales than it cost? How would you know exactly how
profitable the ad was or how much it lost? What if you had several ads
running in different ezines and you also sold the same product off your
own website? How would you know where the sales came from?
The Hard Way
The hard way would be to put a separate page on your website for
each ad you are running. You would then count the number of people who
came to that page by using some kind of statistics package to track the
number of times that page was viewed. This will give you the number of
people that actually came from a particular ad. This presumes that they
didn't trip on your page accidentally from a search engine listing if an
engine somehow indexed your page.
If you only had one ad running and you didn't have your
product promoted on your website, then you could compare the number of
sales that came in the first few days after the ad ran to the cost of
the ad and maybe even the number of visitors from the ad and get a
fairly accurate picture of whether the ad was worth it or not.
The problem with the above method is that it's
unrealistic to take that kind of time and effort to test just one ad.
Also, the accuracy would be really questionable if your product was
available even one other place because you would never know for sure
where any sales "actually" came from.
Software to the Rescue
So what do you do? Well you're probably getting tired about hearing
about
http://www.KickStartCart.com but it has an awesome module that
automatically tells you if your ad was worth it in no time flat with no
effort or hoops to jump through. Also, it's not limited to one campaign
at a time. You could have 50 different ads running concurrently and you
would know exactly which ones are worth it and which ones aren't.
Here's my latest real life example:
I have been selling wedding speech and wedding toast
ebooks at one page websites that I own like
http://www.wedding-toasts.org
and
http://www.wedding-speeches.org Most of my traffic has come from
purchasing pay-per-click ads at Overture.com and Google.com.
Here are some figures I got from my
http://www.KickStartCart.com
ad tracking module on the day this article was written.
A winner
One of the Google Ads produced 3499 clicks, 58 E-book sales, Revenue of
$1002.75, which represented a conversion rate of visitors to sales of
1.7 percent. The conversion tracking aspect of this also told me that
each click to my Wedding Toast site from that ad was worth 27 cents. The
cost per click at Google to get people to this site is only 5 cents, so
this is an extremely profitable ad that I want to run, run, run with.
A loser
Thinking that a very targeted wedding site would generate tons of sales,
I advertised at a site that had a pay-per-click program. I could buy
1000 clicks for $300.00 or 30 cents per click. I dutifully put my ad
tracker on the ads and when the program was finished found that the
wedding speech ad was worth only one cent per click and the wedding
toast ad was worth only six cents per click. These ads were big losers.
When the company came back trying to get me to go with a bigger program
whereby I would get 10,000 clicks for only 15 cents per click. guess
what I said . . .Thanks, but no thanks. I would still be losing 9 cents
to 14 cents per click.
Had I not had the exact figures, I would not have been
able to make that quick decision to cut my losses and if I hadn't had
the software to automate the entire process, I would never have taken
the time to track so closely. . . .I might have taken the 15 cent
deal because sales were increasing, but I wouldn't have know the sales
weren't profitable.
So, automate the process of tracking your ads and you
will identify the winners and the losers quickly.
More
automation techniques:
This section will be an ongoing effort to keep you
from grabbing your mouse which slows you down, and is bad for your
wrist.
-
Use ctrl-home to go to the
top of a web page. Use ctrl-end to go to the bottom of a webpage.
-
ctrl-N opens a new window.
For years whenever I wanted to visit a webpage and then come back to
the one I was looking at, I would lose the first one. I didn't
know you can have more than one browser window open. How dumb I was!
Now I routinely have six or seven open.
Upcoming topics for this section
-
Organize your email
-
Reduce the impact of SPAM email
-
The greatest keyboard shortcuts
-
Respond to emails while you sleep with
autoresponders
-
Using templates so you never have to reinvent the
wheel
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