Archive for January, 2008
Ad Tracking for Affiliate Campaigns
Stephen Carter asked:
When it occurs to you that ad tracking is the next step in your evolution as a pay per click marketer, it is time to pat yourself on the back. You are about to begin a journey that has been traveled by all the super affiliates who use PPC advertising. In fact, for a great many of them, tracking is the sole reason they are now able to call themselves super affiliates.
More often than not, the thought of performing ad tracking is intimidating to affiliates. After all, instead of simply creating your ads you must now ensure that there is some way to track every click as a prospect travels from advert to landing page to sales page to (finally) the Thank You page shown at the conclusion of a sale.
This can only be done by adding a tracking ID of some sort to the URLs followed by the prospect as they advance through your campaign path. The often suggested course of action is to add a unique tracking ID to every keyword used to drive your adverts. This is not difficult in principle, but the devil is in the implementation and the post-sale analysis.
If your campaigns contain hundreds of keywords, or even thousands, the prospect of creating unique tracking URLs for your campaigns can be daunting. Then there is the task of analyzing the results when you retrieve your commission reports from the affiliate networks. Obviously you need software to do as much of this for you as is possible. But which software?
Recently I was introduced to an implementation of ad tracking that I consider to be rather ingenious. I say that because I am a software developer myself and the process used to perform the tracking conversions in this case is one that would probably not have occurred to me had I set out to create my own ad tracking software.
I think the reasoning behind the rather unique ad tracking, implemented by Jeremy Palmer’s Optimize My Site software, has its roots in the fact that Jeremy is not primarily a software developer. Rather he is a serious pay per click marketer who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on his campaigns.
When Jeremy decided to build his own ad tracking system it wasn’t because he wanted to sell the software. It was because he needed to figure out how to identify the components of his own campaigns that were working (and making him money) and those that were not resulting in any sales and were just draining his bank account with the advertising fees.
In other words his motivation was one of absolute necessity as an affiliate. He had to come up with a solution that not only worked, but did so effectively. He now uses the software to save himself hundreds of thousands of dollars every year by accurately identifying which keywords and ads are consistently resulting in sales.
Jeremy eventually released his software as an inexpensive commercial application known as Optimize My Site.
Recently I was able to get my hands on Optimize My Site and look into exactly how it works. I have now written up an in-depth review of the software for those who are looking into ad tracking solutions. To learn whether Optimize My Site might be the ad tracking software that you are looking for, get across to my Optimize My Site Review page and find out how Jeremy’s software rates in my opinion. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at my conclusions.
Kansieo.com
When it occurs to you that ad tracking is the next step in your evolution as a pay per click marketer, it is time to pat yourself on the back. You are about to begin a journey that has been traveled by all the super affiliates who use PPC advertising. In fact, for a great many of them, tracking is the sole reason they are now able to call themselves super affiliates.
More often than not, the thought of performing ad tracking is intimidating to affiliates. After all, instead of simply creating your ads you must now ensure that there is some way to track every click as a prospect travels from advert to landing page to sales page to (finally) the Thank You page shown at the conclusion of a sale.
This can only be done by adding a tracking ID of some sort to the URLs followed by the prospect as they advance through your campaign path. The often suggested course of action is to add a unique tracking ID to every keyword used to drive your adverts. This is not difficult in principle, but the devil is in the implementation and the post-sale analysis.
If your campaigns contain hundreds of keywords, or even thousands, the prospect of creating unique tracking URLs for your campaigns can be daunting. Then there is the task of analyzing the results when you retrieve your commission reports from the affiliate networks. Obviously you need software to do as much of this for you as is possible. But which software?
Recently I was introduced to an implementation of ad tracking that I consider to be rather ingenious. I say that because I am a software developer myself and the process used to perform the tracking conversions in this case is one that would probably not have occurred to me had I set out to create my own ad tracking software.
I think the reasoning behind the rather unique ad tracking, implemented by Jeremy Palmer’s Optimize My Site software, has its roots in the fact that Jeremy is not primarily a software developer. Rather he is a serious pay per click marketer who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on his campaigns.
When Jeremy decided to build his own ad tracking system it wasn’t because he wanted to sell the software. It was because he needed to figure out how to identify the components of his own campaigns that were working (and making him money) and those that were not resulting in any sales and were just draining his bank account with the advertising fees.
In other words his motivation was one of absolute necessity as an affiliate. He had to come up with a solution that not only worked, but did so effectively. He now uses the software to save himself hundreds of thousands of dollars every year by accurately identifying which keywords and ads are consistently resulting in sales.
Jeremy eventually released his software as an inexpensive commercial application known as Optimize My Site.
Recently I was able to get my hands on Optimize My Site and look into exactly how it works. I have now written up an in-depth review of the software for those who are looking into ad tracking solutions. To learn whether Optimize My Site might be the ad tracking software that you are looking for, get across to my Optimize My Site Review page and find out how Jeremy’s software rates in my opinion. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at my conclusions.
Kansieo.com
Testing and Tracking – Your Way to Success
Al Mendoza asked:
I’ll say this once, and once only. It is imperative that you continually track and test all aspects of your online business, including your ad or sales copy. Failure to do this results in loss of potential profits!
In order to create the most effective ad copy for your business you need to experiment with whatever it is you are testing.
For example, if you are testing and tracking your sales copy you should start by changing and testing different versions of the headline, or tweaking the design or altering the layout of the page. And most importantly, you need to be tracking your advertising.
The only way you can measure the results of your testing is to track all your changes, so naturally you should be implementing ways you can do this, such as using tracking software or something similar.
Ok. Now that you know the importance of testing and tracking, let’s look at how you can do this…
Changing the Copy…
As already mentioned above, the most important part of any ad or sales copy is the heading. So the first thing you should test is the heading.
Try using different key words in your heading. Just changing a single word can have a significant effect on the response rate. Use different emotional trigger words to see which combination is most effective.
It really is as simple as test different versions to find the most effective wording. You may be surprised at how a small change can sometimes have a major impact on your results.
You could even add a video or audio to your site to see if this increased results. With video and audio becoming so popular this is a no-brainer and you definitely be testing this to see if it works on your site.
Tweaking the Design…
Studies have proven that simple things such as the type of font you use on your pages can influence the decisions of readers. So knowing this you need to test even the smallest of details such as using different font styles, font sizes and font colors.
Emphasize important words and phrases by placing them in italics, or making them bold, or sparingly using underlining or highlighting important phrases. Add a border, a different border color and/ or a different border style.
Here’s a big tip that most people are unaware of… header images can reduce your profits!
That’s right. Test’s that have been carried with and without header images using the exact same sales copy, the exact same design, the exact same product. Nothing else was changed yet on most occasions the page without the header outperformed the page with the header.
Know your own results may prove different, and maybe the product you’re promoting is better suited to having a header image. But until you test you will never know. It just may be that you are leaving profits on the table without even knowing it.
Try different combinations of all these things to find out which combination works best.
Altering the Layout…
Rearrange the components of your page to see if it affects the response rate. Add a short testimonial or two to see if that has any effect. Try adding more than one order link. You could even test different navigation links to see if this makes a difference.
Here’s one that you may never have thought of…
If you have a capture page, which you should have, try adding more than one subscription box on the page. My tests have proven that by strategically adding a box above the fold of the page, as well as at the bottom of the page, significantly increased opt-in rates.
Test this on your own pages and you may just be surprised with your results.
Tracking Your Advertising…
It is of utmost importance that you track the response rate for any adverting without exception. As a successful online marketer you need to know where you get the best bang-for-your-buck.
Once you find a source that gives you good results, it’s just a matter of repeating and improving the whole process. But unless you know what results you are achieving, this is not possible.
In order to maximize your profits you need to know what works and what doesn’t. You need to know what components of your ad copy works and which don’t. You need to know where your traffic is coming from.
You may get traffic from an ezine ad, from a forum post and from a banner ad. One of these sources may bring you a significant amount of traffic, but if you’re not tracking them how will you know which of these you need to focus on so that you can repeat the process?
The bottom line is that you can only find this out by testing and tracking. And as only about 1% of your competitors are testing and tracking their online business you will have the edge over the other 99% of marketers.
Caffeinated Content for WordPress
I’ll say this once, and once only. It is imperative that you continually track and test all aspects of your online business, including your ad or sales copy. Failure to do this results in loss of potential profits!
In order to create the most effective ad copy for your business you need to experiment with whatever it is you are testing.
For example, if you are testing and tracking your sales copy you should start by changing and testing different versions of the headline, or tweaking the design or altering the layout of the page. And most importantly, you need to be tracking your advertising.
The only way you can measure the results of your testing is to track all your changes, so naturally you should be implementing ways you can do this, such as using tracking software or something similar.
Ok. Now that you know the importance of testing and tracking, let’s look at how you can do this…
Changing the Copy…
As already mentioned above, the most important part of any ad or sales copy is the heading. So the first thing you should test is the heading.
Try using different key words in your heading. Just changing a single word can have a significant effect on the response rate. Use different emotional trigger words to see which combination is most effective.
It really is as simple as test different versions to find the most effective wording. You may be surprised at how a small change can sometimes have a major impact on your results.
You could even add a video or audio to your site to see if this increased results. With video and audio becoming so popular this is a no-brainer and you definitely be testing this to see if it works on your site.
Tweaking the Design…
Studies have proven that simple things such as the type of font you use on your pages can influence the decisions of readers. So knowing this you need to test even the smallest of details such as using different font styles, font sizes and font colors.
Emphasize important words and phrases by placing them in italics, or making them bold, or sparingly using underlining or highlighting important phrases. Add a border, a different border color and/ or a different border style.
Here’s a big tip that most people are unaware of… header images can reduce your profits!
That’s right. Test’s that have been carried with and without header images using the exact same sales copy, the exact same design, the exact same product. Nothing else was changed yet on most occasions the page without the header outperformed the page with the header.
Know your own results may prove different, and maybe the product you’re promoting is better suited to having a header image. But until you test you will never know. It just may be that you are leaving profits on the table without even knowing it.
Try different combinations of all these things to find out which combination works best.
Altering the Layout…
Rearrange the components of your page to see if it affects the response rate. Add a short testimonial or two to see if that has any effect. Try adding more than one order link. You could even test different navigation links to see if this makes a difference.
Here’s one that you may never have thought of…
If you have a capture page, which you should have, try adding more than one subscription box on the page. My tests have proven that by strategically adding a box above the fold of the page, as well as at the bottom of the page, significantly increased opt-in rates.
Test this on your own pages and you may just be surprised with your results.
Tracking Your Advertising…
It is of utmost importance that you track the response rate for any adverting without exception. As a successful online marketer you need to know where you get the best bang-for-your-buck.
Once you find a source that gives you good results, it’s just a matter of repeating and improving the whole process. But unless you know what results you are achieving, this is not possible.
In order to maximize your profits you need to know what works and what doesn’t. You need to know what components of your ad copy works and which don’t. You need to know where your traffic is coming from.
You may get traffic from an ezine ad, from a forum post and from a banner ad. One of these sources may bring you a significant amount of traffic, but if you’re not tracking them how will you know which of these you need to focus on so that you can repeat the process?
The bottom line is that you can only find this out by testing and tracking. And as only about 1% of your competitors are testing and tracking their online business you will have the edge over the other 99% of marketers.
Caffeinated Content for WordPress
The Advantages of Tracking your Articles
Jo Mark asked:
Why would I need to track my articles? After all, my counter tells me if a hit to my site came from xyz submission site, so what is the advantage in adding tracking data?
I write a lot of articles, and, as a result, many of them are picked up and published by ezines that I never submit to. Although my counter tells me that this hit came from ABC ezine, I don’t know how it got there. By adding a tracking string to my URL, when that hit arrives on my site, it tells me exactly where it came from.
Another advantage in tracking your articles is that it can make you more efficient. Some time ago, I entered a tracking code into each article that I submitted to the smaller submission sites. After about three weeks, I noticed that I had not received any hits from a number of these sites. I was wasting my time in submitting to these sites. As a result, I deleted about 90 sites from my submission list. (I had been submitting each article to about 150 sites.) After that test, I paired my submission list down to about 60 sites. I saved about an hour a day with absolutely no decline in traffic! That is the power of a good tracking campaign.
In addition, you can track the performance of your ads and emails. With a good tracking campaign, you can determine which of your ads are working the best. If you find that one particular ad is performing better than others, use it more consistently and drop the poor performers. You are just wasting money when you place an ad that does not perform well. With each ad that I place, I enter the ad along with the tracking data into a file and save it on the computer. Then, it is an easy matter to see which ads are doing well and which ones are doing poorly. That way, I am continually improving the performance of my ad and email campaigns.
How do you track your articles and ads? It is actually quite simple. At the end of your URL, enter a slash, then a question mark, and the name of the test, ad, subject line, or Ezine that you are tracking (for example-blahblahblah.com/?ad1). Each time your website gets a hit from that source, your counter will log that visitor as coming from ad1. By comparing hits from competing ads, or articles, you can determine which are the most successful. Before you commit to any significant tracking campaign using this method, do a simple test to ensure that your website works properly with tracking data. Some servers do not recognize it and will return a “site not found” notice. If this is the case, you cannot use this simple tracking method.
We are all in this business for the same reason, to make money. To maximize the income you generate, track your results. By entering a small string after your URL you can determine where your website visitors are coming from. This can make a significant difference in your efficiency as well as your profits. A good tracking system can significantly improve the performance of your ads, articles, and subject lines.
Caffeinated Content
Why would I need to track my articles? After all, my counter tells me if a hit to my site came from xyz submission site, so what is the advantage in adding tracking data?
I write a lot of articles, and, as a result, many of them are picked up and published by ezines that I never submit to. Although my counter tells me that this hit came from ABC ezine, I don’t know how it got there. By adding a tracking string to my URL, when that hit arrives on my site, it tells me exactly where it came from.
Another advantage in tracking your articles is that it can make you more efficient. Some time ago, I entered a tracking code into each article that I submitted to the smaller submission sites. After about three weeks, I noticed that I had not received any hits from a number of these sites. I was wasting my time in submitting to these sites. As a result, I deleted about 90 sites from my submission list. (I had been submitting each article to about 150 sites.) After that test, I paired my submission list down to about 60 sites. I saved about an hour a day with absolutely no decline in traffic! That is the power of a good tracking campaign.
In addition, you can track the performance of your ads and emails. With a good tracking campaign, you can determine which of your ads are working the best. If you find that one particular ad is performing better than others, use it more consistently and drop the poor performers. You are just wasting money when you place an ad that does not perform well. With each ad that I place, I enter the ad along with the tracking data into a file and save it on the computer. Then, it is an easy matter to see which ads are doing well and which ones are doing poorly. That way, I am continually improving the performance of my ad and email campaigns.
How do you track your articles and ads? It is actually quite simple. At the end of your URL, enter a slash, then a question mark, and the name of the test, ad, subject line, or Ezine that you are tracking (for example-blahblahblah.com/?ad1). Each time your website gets a hit from that source, your counter will log that visitor as coming from ad1. By comparing hits from competing ads, or articles, you can determine which are the most successful. Before you commit to any significant tracking campaign using this method, do a simple test to ensure that your website works properly with tracking data. Some servers do not recognize it and will return a “site not found” notice. If this is the case, you cannot use this simple tracking method.
We are all in this business for the same reason, to make money. To maximize the income you generate, track your results. By entering a small string after your URL you can determine where your website visitors are coming from. This can make a significant difference in your efficiency as well as your profits. A good tracking system can significantly improve the performance of your ads, articles, and subject lines.
Caffeinated Content
Use a Simple Tracking Technique to Increase Profits
Jo Mark asked:
One of the most important activities required if you are marketing articles is tracking your results. It is extremely important to know which of your efforts are paying off and which ones are wasting your time and or money.
It is important to know which article submission sites are working for you. If you are not getting any results from a particular site, stop wasting your time and submit to someone else. Maybe the clientele from that site is not interested in your particular niche. If you are diligent in tracking your results, you will know this right away and can stop wasting time with them.
It is particularly important to know which of your ads are working. This is even more critical if you are using paid ads. If the profit an ad generates is less than the cost of the ad, you need to advertise elsewhere. This type of information is readily available if you are tracking your results. Too many people write up several ads and send them out along with a check week after week. Because they are happy with the total results, they never bother to check which individual ones are working. With diligent tracking, you can see if a particular ad is profitable.
Good tracking will also allow you to test how an ad performs. Keep good records on the results from each ad. Change just one thing on your worst performing ad and watch the results. Continue doing this with each ad and you will improve your profits by significant amounts.
I get a lot of questions on how to track an ad (or article). It is actually quite simple. At the end of your URL, enter a question mark and the name of the test, ad, or Ezine that you are tracking (for example-blahblahblah.com?ad1). Each time your website gets a hit from that source, your counter will log that information. By comparing hits from competing ads, or articles, you can determine which are the most successful. Before you commit to any substantial tracking campaign using this method, do a simple test to ensure that your website works properly with the question mark test. Some servers do not recognize it and will return a “site not found” notice. If this is the case, you cannot use this simple tracking method.
Of course, you also have to have a good counter for this to work. You can find many free counters on the Internet by doing a search.
When tracking your paid ads, eliminate the less profitable ones. Then, commit more money (for bigger ads) in those publications that are profitable. If you do not want to use larger ads, seek out other publications to replace those less profitable ads.
The same is true if you are using free ads. Replace non-performing ads with free ads in other publications. By doing this, you will continually upgrade your ad performance, and ultimately, your profitability.
Caffeinated Content
One of the most important activities required if you are marketing articles is tracking your results. It is extremely important to know which of your efforts are paying off and which ones are wasting your time and or money.
It is important to know which article submission sites are working for you. If you are not getting any results from a particular site, stop wasting your time and submit to someone else. Maybe the clientele from that site is not interested in your particular niche. If you are diligent in tracking your results, you will know this right away and can stop wasting time with them.
It is particularly important to know which of your ads are working. This is even more critical if you are using paid ads. If the profit an ad generates is less than the cost of the ad, you need to advertise elsewhere. This type of information is readily available if you are tracking your results. Too many people write up several ads and send them out along with a check week after week. Because they are happy with the total results, they never bother to check which individual ones are working. With diligent tracking, you can see if a particular ad is profitable.
Good tracking will also allow you to test how an ad performs. Keep good records on the results from each ad. Change just one thing on your worst performing ad and watch the results. Continue doing this with each ad and you will improve your profits by significant amounts.
I get a lot of questions on how to track an ad (or article). It is actually quite simple. At the end of your URL, enter a question mark and the name of the test, ad, or Ezine that you are tracking (for example-blahblahblah.com?ad1). Each time your website gets a hit from that source, your counter will log that information. By comparing hits from competing ads, or articles, you can determine which are the most successful. Before you commit to any substantial tracking campaign using this method, do a simple test to ensure that your website works properly with the question mark test. Some servers do not recognize it and will return a “site not found” notice. If this is the case, you cannot use this simple tracking method.
Of course, you also have to have a good counter for this to work. You can find many free counters on the Internet by doing a search.
When tracking your paid ads, eliminate the less profitable ones. Then, commit more money (for bigger ads) in those publications that are profitable. If you do not want to use larger ads, seek out other publications to replace those less profitable ads.
The same is true if you are using free ads. Replace non-performing ads with free ads in other publications. By doing this, you will continually upgrade your ad performance, and ultimately, your profitability.
Caffeinated Content