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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' which is completely focused
on ebook business and Internet Marketing. Receive FREE Ebooks with Resale rights
every month!
http://www.ebooks-world.com/freetosell.shtml
Webmaster Resources: List Your product, ezine or web site free!
http://www.webmasters-central.com/
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