Do you track the success of your advertising campaigns? If you’re like the vast majority of moms on the internet, your answer is a big no.
Most of us are buying ads and sending the traffic to our main page (which has issues of its own but that’s another topic) and we’re doing nothing to check and see if that ad performs well for us or not.
There are some very simple and some fairly complicated ways to track your advertising efforts. Let’s start by taking a look at the simple tactics:
Create a Special Landing Page
If you are buying an ad in the Purple Mommy Ezine to promote your great baby bibs, you should create a new page on your website that will:
- Greet Purple Mommy Ezine Subscribers
- Highlight your baby bibs
- Include a special Purple Mommy Ezine subscriber purchase link.
- Include a back up invitation to subscribe to your mailing list.
If you do this – you will know:
- How many Purple Mommy Ezine readers clicked through to your website.
- How many Purple Mommy Ezine readers bought something.
On the other hand, if you just sent them all to your main page – you’d know exactly nothing. (Except maybe a little spike in your visitors numbers.) You wouldn’t know how many of those visitors came from your ad and you won’t know if these specifically bought anything.
I’ve heard people say before ‘I put an ad in so an so ezine and I got lots of visitors!’ Well, our goal in business is not to get visitors. Our goal in business is to make sales. So create that landing page and know exactly what benefit you’re getting from your ad.
Let me sneak in a little extra advice here…
If you do buy that Purple Mommy Ezine ad and you don’t get the visitors or sales you are looking for. I wouldn’t immediately decide that it was a dud. You should always go for multiple hits on a mailing list if it is at all possible. So ask the ezine owner if you can buy a series of three ads to be sent out within a few weeks of each other. The repeated exposure to your message will more valuable than a single ad. But track everything!
Use a Coupon Code
If you have a shopping cart that provides you with ability to create coupon codes you can send your traffic directly to the specific item that you are promoting in your ad. You won’t necessarily be able to measure traffic, but you will know if the referred visitor buys anything by the coupon code used at check out.
This is a common ad tracking tool for email ads, post cards and business cards. You can create multiple codes for all of your different advertising efforts and be able to see how each one performs for you over time.
There are other more technologically advanced methods of ad tracking. I’ll share some more on these another time.
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