Monitoring the Results of Your Online Ad
Monitoring Your Results
Once your advert has gone online, you need to be able to monitor it effectively to see if it is working. As a minimum you need to see the number of visitors that have been taken to your site from the ad; and ideally you need to see how many people have seen the ad; so you can work out what percentage are clicking on it.
Site Tracking – Some sites will have advertising systems that allow you to log in and see the number of views and clicks your ad has got. This is ideal as you can see your results quickly and easily.
Page Tracking – If the site does not have any tracking you could try using your web statistics software to track the number of page views you get. By creating a copy of the target page with an extra tag for where the ad is (e.g. abc.com/index-bizad.html) you can set the ad to point here and track the views. However, this cannot track how many views the ad itself gets.
Software Tracking – Tracking your ad can be done using specialist tracking software (similar to those used by the advertisers above), this normally involves a special link or code being used which allows it to monitor the results. Tracking tools are available both in paid and free versions, though you need to be careful about which free tools you use; you should find reliable recommendations before passing your details to a free tracking company.
These tools will usually change the link of your ad (E.g. linktrackingsite.com/abc1.html), so you will need to pass the correct URL onto the advertising site for the tracking to work.
Did It Work ? – Once your ad has finished running, you need to look at the results and see if it was effective. This may depend on what your aims were; so if you were simply looking to increase awareness of your company you would happier with fewer new sales than if you were pushing a new product.
Even if the ad did provide a good return, you should take the time (especially after your first ad) to look through the results and see if there are any areas you can improve. If you can improve the ad, the targeting of sites you advertised on, the positioning on the site, or even the page the ad takes you to, then you could make your ad more cost effective next time around.
If you believe the site itself was at fault for the lack of success for the ad (and this is actually very rare), then let them know the reasons you were unhappy (e.g. Ad not shown as frequently as promised, ad not displaying / linking correctly). This may get you a price reduction for a second ad if you are happy to try them again.
Remember that people usually need to see ads several times before they respond to them; so you may find that running an ad for a short period of time (I.e. 1-2 weeks) will produce a lower proportion of results to one run over a longer period of time (I.e.: 1-2 months and upwards). You should also be wary of using the same ad for too long, after a few months people may stop paying attention to it as they will have seen it 20-30 times before. Try altering your ad slightly every few months to keep it interesting.
Finally, don’t forget that advertising is not an exact science. Even multi-billion pound companies (with multi-million pound budgets!) get it wrong; so take your time to make sure you are doing everything possible to increase the chances of success.
Advertising Your Business Offline: Contents How Can Your Business Benefit from Search Engine Advertising? What is a Strapline?Article Index
- How to Use Online Advertising - Why and Where?
- Pricing of Your Online Advertisement - Where to Place It?
- Creating and Booking Your Online Advert
- Monitoring the Results of Your Online Ad
- Related Articles
