By Karen Fegarty

Mailworkz

Without tracking, your online advertising is just a shot in the dark. Many new and seasoned marketing individuals spend significant dollars on pay-per-click (PPC) banner advertisements, ezine ads, and other online media, but do not know which ads have brought them the greatest success.

You know you should be tracking all of your online ad buys, but are you? Do you understand your numbers and what you should do with them? Are you refining your email and online marketing efforts accordingly?

It is important to track all of your online advertisement, even if your ad provider is showing you your results. You need to employ your own tracking to double check.

Types of online marketing avenues you should be monitoring:

• Site links
• PPC
• Articles
• Ezine advertisement
• Banner ads
• Signatures tag
• Forum postings
• Email marketing promotions
• Free classified listings
• Paid classified listings
• Surveys
• Auto responder
• Reciprocal link

Statistics you should be concerned with:

Open-rate - Particularily important in email marketing. This statisitic tells you how many people opened your email marketing message. This number should be used as an estimate to measure trends, not an absolute number. Many variables can effect the accuracy of this count. For example, an open-rate cannot be used in a text message, so if your message is being displayed and opened in text, the count will not increment. As well, this count is incremented if Outlook clients are displaying the preview pane. If a client shows the message in a preview pane and then clicks to open, you get a count of two.

Click-thru - A count of how many people clicked on a particular link in an email or on a text or banner link on a website. Ensure your tracking software or service shows both clicks and unique clicks. The number you should be most concerned with is unique clicks. You do not want to be billed for someone who clicks on a particular ad 30 times in one minute.

Sales or actions count - Most tracking systems offer the ability to place code on your sales confirmation page and tie this to a tracking link. This count tells you which online ad resulted in a sale.

Sale details - Some tracking systems allow you to add specific details about the sale to the tracking result. This usually requires you to be able to add code to the server side code of your website.

How do I get these statistics?

You need to employ a specialized tracking link for all your email marketing and online marketing efforts. Many advertising options provide you with these statistics, and PPC engines like Overture and Google provide you with click counts. It is important to employ your own ad tracking to get the results from advertising that does not provide you with stats, as well as double checking the results from those that do.

There are two main types of ad tracking systems. One, a service that is web-based that allows you to manage your tracking without the need for servers, or software downloads, and two, software you need to employ and manage on your server.

Service options -
Eztrackz
Hypertracker
Adminder

Software options -
AdtrackZ
Dynatracker

What your statistics tell you:

• Which ad copy had the most clicks and led to the largest number of actions or sales
• How many people opened your email messages and if you should resend
• Who opened your email message and should you resend to those that did not, or send a follow-up to those that did
• What faired better - banners or text links
• If your PPC advertising count and bill match your ad tracking results
• If your online ad resulted in a positive ROI

Gathering statistics is just a start. Now that you have this data, you can make decisions and refinements to your email and online marketing.

Take this information and change your marketing accordingly. You will find you often can save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, monthly.

About the Author:

Karen Fegarty is a marketer with Mailworkz and Eztrackz. Mailworkz is an innovative company focused on developing effective emarketing tools. With products like Broadcast email marketing software, and services like Eztrackz online ad tracking, and the newest addition, Blacklist Monitor, thousands of Mailworkz customers have a suite of products to help increase market share, revenue and profits, while improving their customer relationships. For more information on products or services offered at Mailworkz, please click here.