How do you measure success in online advertising?

From: Michael Martinez <Michael_at_xenite.org>
Date: Fri 11 May 2001 10:05:17 -0500

JOHN GASKILL <gm_at_info-central-usa.com> WROTE:

>Yes, I'd rather put up with the ads than have to pay
>for content. But I've got a Web site to promote. I
>have a book to sell. For what it's worth, I stopped
>paying for advertising. Why? Because I couldn't
>measure the success of the advertising.

>Could you not measure the success? Or was the
>advertising not successful and you did not want
>to admit it or know how to fix it?

If there is one thing I have learned how to do, it's
drive traffic to a Web site. I had traffic coming in
from so many quarters I couldn't tell if the
advertising was paying for itself. Keep in mind that,
in addition to all my pontificating on various fora,
I run over 100 Web sites on my domain, write, take care
of private life, and read hundreds of messages every day
(responding to a fraction of them, but some of those
responses can take a lot of time to research and write).

Oh, I also have an offline life. If the information I
needed to determine whether the paid advertising was
worth the money I paid for it, it wasn't immediately
obvious to me. But I also tried more than one program.
For example, I paid for some impressions on Amazon.
I got high visibility, but my sales rank today is
35,664. That is, to my knowledge the best it's ever
been. And this is more than a month after I stopped
paying for advertising (more than 2 months after I
stopped paid advertising on Amazon itself). If that
is the only criterion which matters, the paid
advertising was a waste of my time and money. Or did
it set into motion some intangible results I cannot
track? What if "the right people" saw those ads and
started a
word-of-mouth campaign for my book?

>Is that the problem with online advertising in general?

>I don't think that problem is limited to online advertising
>at all. It seems widespread based on the heaps of
>poor advertising out there.

And poor sales techniques. I am sure I'm a rotten book
seller, when it comes right down to it. I generate
thousands of click-throughs to my book page. I'm
selling copies of my book, but not THOUSANDS (I wish!
New York would be knocking on my door, saying, "Hey!
We want some of that action, son!"). So, I'm losing
a lot of people after the click-through.

On the other hand, conventional wisdom in the publishing
industry seems to be that you MUST get thousands of
people to look at a book in order to sell a few copies.
Traditional publishers can move tons of books to thousands
of book stores across North America. So millions of
people see their titles every week. And most people
still buy their books offline.

But the bottom line for me is that I couldn't measure
the impact of the paid advertising. I still can't. And
I'm not fond of making shots in the dark.

Michael Martinez
 Science Fiction and Fantasy info_at_xenite.org
  Visualizing Middle-earth, a book for all Tolkien fans
   http://www.xenite.org/



Received on Fri May 11 2001 - 10:05:17 CDT