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 simple click thrus you can go one step further and calculate the number of sales per one advertising method (rio tracking).

Here are few methods you can use to track your results.

1. Email subscription Tracking:

You can give a little code to your subscription email addresses.

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 the 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.

http://www.yourdomain.com/product.html?source=ebook

Use this same method to track product pages too. See the examples below -

http://www.yourdomain.com/produst.html?campaign=1
http://www.yourdomain.com/produst.html?campaign=2
http://www.yourdomain.com/produst.html?campaign=3

You can also upload a different page for SAME product for each of your ad campaign.

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.

So you can see how many hits are coming to your ‘/produst.html?campaign=1′ page and referers.

3. Click Tracking Software:

If you have a good click and RIO tracking software that records all details about your referer pages and visitors you can also use that to track your results. This way you save lot of time by keeping all your product pages, campaigns and tracking stats in one place.

IMPORTANT TIPS IN TESTING YOUR ADs:

1. Don’t delete old campaign urls. If you delete that URL on your server people will get ‘404 page not found’ error and you will lose your potential visitor. Or keep 301 redirects to real product page.

2.  In email campaigns consider short URLs. Long URLs will break up into two lines and the reader can not click on it to get to the landing page.

3.  Test ONE VARIABLE at a time. Suppose you want to test two variables -

* two different types of sales letter
* by giving free gifts with your product

Don’t test both at once. First check the sales page variable. Test which sales page is doing good. If you get good response to one of the sales pages, then use that sales page. Next move to testing free gifts to buyers variable.

Good luck with tracking! Everything is in testing and optimizing …

Author: Radhika (c)
http://www.webmasters-central.com/

Tags: ad testing, campaign tracking, click tracking, email link tracking, roi tracking
Posted in: Web site Promotion