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

Back to September 2002 Index page