All these tools are definitely useful and tempting. There is a lot of literature about all of them. However, opinions may substantially differ and you may be at the end rather confused as to which ones are the best for your business. What matters most is that you must understand their limitations and applicability to your business in order to maximise the efficiency of your campaigns. How can you do this?

Let's firstly recall the substance of advertising. This is increasing the visibility/traffic of your site. More importantly, this is getting a high conversion rate (CR) from this traffic. CRs depend on many variables, such as ad quality, web site response time, landing pages, easy of purchases, seasonality to name just a few of them. It is therefore difficult to provide normative data for every business as there are always particular conditions applicable to each of them. While you can not (you do not actually need to) have an exact answer to the question, "what should my conversion rate be?" you (do) need the CR as an effective benchmark against which you can measure the impact of your marketing programs on overall conversion data. Therefore, the right question is: How can you improve your CR?

Pay for SEO in order to get increased free organic traffic? Pay for targeted ads and quality landing pages through a well developed and sophisticated paid search? Or pay for one or more of the so many advertising tools (including affiliate programs and JV), more or less sophisticated and available on the market? The answer to this question looks difficult but it's not.

As a matter of fact, you must be able to track EVERY aspect of your advertising to determine what's working and what's not. You must be able to know exactly the ROI for each of your ads, which of them generated the most of visitors, subscribers, downloads, sales, which is the cost per sale, or click to sale ratio.

To illustrate this, suppose that you want to sell a product, say an ebook. So, you decide to test several body texts for your ads. You write down the results for each different ad (which one is getting clicks) and you analyse the results. On this basis, you fine tune the body text until you find one that really "pulls". Let's use this example...

I want to advertise my ebook and decide to test an ad using 5 different body text. I name each ad as follows: ad1, ad2, ad3, ad4 and ad5. I then send the ads out and record the clicks. The results could be as follows:

Ad1: 10 clicks Ad2: 8 clicks Ad3: 19 clicks Ad4: 58 clicks Ad5: 25 clicks As you can see, Ad4 is clearly the best performing ad. But this does not end there. Suppose that you have the following results in sales:

Ad1: 2 sales Ad2: 0 sales Ad3: 1 sale Ad4: 3 sales Ad5: 5 sales The above shows that CR for Ad5 is 20% while for Ad4 only 5%. Well, this is it. I guess you see the point. Of course, this is a quite easy and self explaining example but the reality is quite more complicated. However, this shows the importance of what I mentioned above: you must be able to track EVERY aspect of your advertising to determine what's working and what's not. This way you can continually fine tune your campaigns optimising your marketing budget and maximising the CR and thus the benefits.

For this purpose, you need an excellent tracking system that can accurately track and manage all of your ads, will show you exactly how many visitors were generated by each of your ads, reveal which ads generate the most visitors, subscribers, downloads, sales, etc. It will show you how many Clicks, Sales, etc. an ad generated for any date range. It even calculates Calculate cost-per-click, cost-per-sale, and click-to-sale ratios for each ad.


Sonath Somer
Marketing adviser MaxProfitsAds

Article courtesy GoArticles