First things first, let's define the two. Advertising is the act of getting your message in front of an audience. There are any number of ways to do this, that's really not the theme of this message. Being able to track a sale backwards to the advertising that produced it,is.
Second, Marketing is the over all process you use to promote your products and/or services. This includes advertising, but is in no way limited to advertising. Again the theme here is not to talk about marketing techniques, but the method's you can use to track their success.
The very nature of the Internet provides you with a variety of unique tracking methods. At it's very simplest you can produce 10 separate web pages to advertise in 10 different forums.
Example: You have a page selling widgets you want to do a banner campaign with 10 different banners. You can create 10 mirror pages i.e. Widgets.html, Widgets1.html, Widgets2.html etc, etc.
In this way a different URL is associated with each of the different banners you send out and your able to track which banner is producing the most traffic from 10 identical sites.
There is a much simpler and less time intensive way however, to achieve that exact same result.
You have your index page and rather than mirroring it 10 times you simply add ?Widgets1 , ?Widgets2, ?Widgets3, etc, etc, to the URL.
Test it here:
http://NetServeInt.com
http://NetServeInt.com/?index1
http://NetServeInt.com/?index2
http://NetServeInt.com/?index3
Even though the same page is served up to your visitors, your server logs treat it as 10 different pages!
You can use this method to track any type of campaign not just banners. If you were to advertise in a publication such as this one, (higly recommended by the way) as well as others using the same URL in all of them, you would have no way of knowing that 80% of the traffic produced from those ad's came from here. If however you used a different URL ?index2, ?index3, etc, etc. You would know which ad drew how much traffic.
Do you use (legal) e-mail methods to advertise? This technique will also work in that forum. Simply alter your URL as described above in each of your different promo letters and your able to track which ones produce the most traffic. Thereby allowing you to discard the ones that don't produce. Just as you will the z- ine, newsletter, or banner champaign that's not paying it's way.
As an added bonus you can do exactly the same type of thing with e-mail responses. Rather than having 10 different response addresses.
You place an ad with an e-mail link or have an e-mail link rather than a URL attached to a banner or any other response link. As in the URL example you vary the link according to where it will be seen.
Example:
Ad running in 4 E-Zines
1st one has e-mail link
<A HREF="mailto:info@Widgets.com?subject=Widgets1">here:
2nd one has e-mail link
<A HREF="mailto:info@Widgets.com?subject=Widgets2">here:
3rd one has e-mail link
<A HREF="mailto:info@Widgets.com?subject=Widgets3">here:
4th one has e-mail link
<A HREF="mailto:info@Widgets.com?subject=Widgets4">here:
As you can see the reply you receive has a different text in the subject field. Allowing you to track were your responses are originating from.
No matter which way you choose to track your promotional efforts it's important that do track them. You can waste countless hours and dollars on a strategy that is actually producing no results. You may well find that the less costly method works as well if not better than the one that cost you an arm and a leg.
Again, it matters not which method you choose, it only matters that you choose one and use it faithfully. You'll be surprised how much information your begin to have at your disposal.
"Your Success Is Our Success"
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