Tracking Internet Advertising
The great thing about IM is that every advertisement you place can be tracked. For example every click that arrives at your website can be tracked. For example, you can track pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements down to the level of the keywords that the searcher typed in to find your ad. Proceeding a step further, you are able to track the consequent sales coming from that click. Regardless of whether you’re using free or paid advertising to get hits to your website, it is crucial to be able to measure the results of your campaigns.
As a business organisation, you ought to know your return on investment (ROI) for your advertising campaigns. In the domain of offline advertising such as newsprint or magazine classified advertisements, you’ll frequently find that advertizers use a different department number or postal box for each advertisement. They use the an equivalent mailing address but add another department code. In this way, they can monitor how different ads perform based on the enquiries that get directed to the different sections.
This works also for the 800 numbers that you call to get more information about products that you’ve seen or learned about. Companies can establish different toll-free numbers used for each ad and that’s how they can track the effectiveness of multiple advertising campaigns. In offline advertising, it’s much more expensive to set up the tracking. Imagine the costs associated with arranging different phone numbers or multiple Post Office boxes.
In the internet world, however, tracking becomes much cheaper as you are able to apply it using an mixture of scripts or software programs. With PPC advertising, you are able to easily use a simple PHP script to enable you to capture the keywords coming from a Google search referral – not to mention Google analytics.
Let’s examine another example. With a lot of web hosting packages, you’re allowed to set up multiple email addresses. You can set it up so that in each advertisement you use another email address. Then when you get an email inquiry to a specific e-mail address, you’ll know where that enquiry originated from. Another way to do this is to create multiple subdomains to use as the link in your ads. For instance, if you’re advertising in online e-zines, you are able to duplicate the same ad copy but send the readers to a different subdomain using a different URL for each ad.
When you’re able to track the efforts of all your advertising, you’ll be able to sit down at the end of the business month and work out which campaigns are generating the best ROI. You are then able to scale those campaigns or fine-tune them to try and maximise your profits. If you’re not tracking), then you’re simply flying blind and you’re depending more on chance. Start tracking your advertising (campaigns today.
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