Getting the Most Out of Your Advertising Dollars

[archibald]

You have a big Internet marketing campaign but a small budget for advertising. That being the case, it can be difficult to advertise everywhere at once. However, it’s not hard to track your advertising to see what’s working and what’s not. When you discover something that’s not working, try replacing it with another one that might work.

Today you’ll learn how to track your advertising, so you can try every avenue and only pay for what works. The first thing you’ll need to track your advertising is a spreadsheet that you can modify. In addition, you’ll need to be able to check your website’s statistics. You can do this with a free service like Google’s Analytics, but it’s best if you use a free or paid service that shows referring URLs and the dates of visits from those URLS.

Keeping Track
It’s simpler to keep track of your advertising by creating a landing page for the product(s) or service(s) you’re marketing. That said, enter the URL of the landing page you’ll be advertising. Doing this helps you remember what you’re marketing when you return to your spreadsheet to track your advertising. Speaking of returning to track your advertising, you should try to do this once a day or every other day.

Enter the URLs of the places where you advertised your product(s) or service(s) underneath “Ad Location.” This could be the URL of a blog where you purchased ad space, an online publication or etc.

Next to the URLs where you placed your ad, record the date that you placed the ad.

Specify the types of ads you placed at each URL.

If you offered any special discounts or freebies, list the deals you promoted. Offering discounts and freebies could increase your sales.

Type in the coupon code you specified with the discounts and freebies you offered as well as the number of people who used the code. Using a unique coupon code for each ad that you place lets you see that those who claimed the codes came from the ad you placed on so and so’s site, blog or online publication.

Finally, enter the number of people who came to your site from the URLs you advertised on.

Once you’ve completed your spreadsheet, you’ll be able to see which sites, blogs and online publications sent you the most traffic and earned you a return on your investment. Then you’ll just cancel your ads at the places that didn’t work out for you and invest those advertising dollars somewhere else. Here’s an example: Looking at the spreadsheet below, you can see that onlinepublication1.com and onlinepublication2.com didn’t perform as well as the others. Therefore, it would be best to cancel the ads with those two publications and try placing them with someone else who is listed on your Internet marketing campaign. Since the others seem to be performing fairly well, you can continue to track them until they slow down. Once those ads stop performing well, consider canceling them and running them elsewhere.

And that, my friend, is how you can get the most out of your advertising dollars. Of course you can also use the spreadsheet to track any free marketing you’ve done.
Happy marketing!

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