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://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
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!!
Radhika Venkata - Subscribe to 'EbookBiz Magazine'
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