Tool #6 – Your Ad Tracking Software
(If you missed earlier parts of this series, just go here —> Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6)
This last tool… your ad tracking software… is one that a lot of marketers overlook… maybe most overlook… and they are wasting time and/or money.
Why?
Let me describe the situation like this…
Would you be running your air conditioner all day while leaving ALL of your windows and doors open, letting all of the cooled air out and hot air in?
Of course you wouldn’t…
But that exactly what most marketers are doing… they advertise with sources that they invest their time and hard earned cash into, and they have no idea of their “ROI” (Return On Investment). They don’t know where all of their “cooled air” is going.
What you, as a marketer need to do is track the results of their advertising… see which sources are working, and which are not.
You need to see how vital it is to scientifically measure the effectiveness of your advertising sources.
It doesn’t matter whether they are free ads or paid ads… you’re still throwing your resources away if they are NOT producing clicks on your links. After all, nobody wants to waste either time or money… right?
You do this by using tracking software to measure the number of clicks your ads are generating.
About four years ago I went through the process of testing over 150+ advertising sites to find which ones were actually delivering clicks to my affiliate links.
Testing Your Advertising Results
Here is the process I followed:
Step 1
First, I created a spreadsheet to record my results. I included the name of the advertising site, the credits to send email ads to the maximum number of recipients allowed on the “free” level, and the number of clicks received by those emails.
Step 2
I always sent out the same ad copy on the same day of the week at about the same time. I then recorded the results for 3 weeks and used the spreadsheet to display the total number of clicks and the average clicks for each mailing.
Step 3
Finally, I used the spreadsheet to reorder the mailers by the number of clicks received. I then determined a cutoff point that I believed to be effective… in my case I started at 20 clicks per mailing… if an advertising site didn’t deliver at least 20 clicks, I no longer used it.
Some things to take away from this test..
1. The test you are viewing is not up to date. Several of those advertising sites are not even in existence today. Also, there is a typo in the spreadsheet resulting in an average of over 800 clicks on one source… I only wish it were so.
2. The average click through rate for the mailers is barely over one percent. As a whole, these free advertising sites are not very efficient advertising sources. Of course they don’t cost you anything either… except time, which is in reality costs more than money… you can’t replace time.
3. There are a lot of 1’s and 0’s on that spreadsheet… that means I spent a lot of time and effort collecting credits to enable me to mail out my ads, and I only got one click… or NONE!
Where Can You Find Tracking Software?
You may be asking “What Tracking Software Do You Use, Greg?” I have tried many, but the one I am currently using for all my tracking is Pretty Links. It runs on your own WordPress blog, and there’s no cost involved.
Scientific Advertising…
One last thing… this process of tracking your advertising to determine the effectiveness of your promotions is NOT all that new.
Master marketer and author, Claude Hopkins, wrote what could be the textbook for “Scientific Advertising”, as it was titled, way back in 1923.
Since it is now in the public domain, I can share with you a download link where you can get it absolutely free.
Here’s that link…
https://www.scientificadvertising.com/ScientificAdvertising.pdf
That concluded our discussion of the “Six Essential Tools Every Marketer Needs”…
I hope you got a lot out of these blog posts, and more importantly, I hope you put them into action.
