Re: How do you measure success in online advertising?

From: John Gaskill <jg_at_info-central-usa.com>
Date: Thu 31 May 2001 11:51:44 -0500

MICHAEL MARTINEZ <michael_at_xenite.org> WROTE:

> There is no way I would pay for a generic listing
> on Xenite.Org. The ads I bought for specific content,
> mostly for my book. People clicked through to look at
> the information about the book, and the ads made it
> clear that is what they would find.

> However, the book was being promoted in other ways.
> The book continues to sell even without the paid listings.

If the book continues to sell without advertising, it should
sell even better if it is advertised effectively.

MICHAEL MARTINEX THEN WROTE:

>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.

TO WHICH JOHN GASKILL REPLIED:

>Get a flashlight. Read John Caples' tome, now in its nth
>edition, "Tested Advertising Methods." Learn to make your
>advertising pay and be sure of how much it is paying.

and MICHAEL MARTINEZ RESPONDED:

>You're missing the point here. The paid advertising
>accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish: it
>generated click-throughs. If there was a failure to
>sell, that occurred on the two different Web pages where
>the book was being pitched.

If you are spending money to drive unfocused traffic
to pages that sell a specific product - a book - and
you don't believe you are spending money to raise the
sales of the book I am glad you are not handling my
advertising budget.

Your comments indicate two possible failures:

1.) That the destination web pages did not do a good job of
selling should have been obvious before you paid money for
advertising to generate extra traffic.

        Caples' books are about testing the copy in advance
to make sure what you use is effective, and testing it on the
fly to confirm its effectiveness or lack thereof.

IF you know how to drive traffic you should have tested
your pages by driving traffic to two different versions of
the page, comparing sales ratios, then using the better page
(with a different URL) as the destination for your ad.

2.) If the purpose of the ad was to generate click throughs,
did you not want the click throughs to buy the book?

        The tone, message and nature of copy used in your
advertising may have been insufficiently focused to raise sales
when combined with the web pages. Only you can know
the answer to that one. As for completed transactions,
the tracking URLs within your site should have told you
what traffic to which web pages produced the greatest sales.

Tracking online sales generated by online or offline
advertising is not an easy process but it is manageable with
advance planning.

John Caples made a science of the process of tracking sales
to specific advertisements and did it successfully for years.

The directive nature of the internet as a medium makes
it easier to document the success and failure of advertising
if you are willing to keep tweaking it and continue marching
forward.

Being able to document why or where advertising failed
is just as much a success as having a sales increase
result.

It's just not as much fun or nearly as profitable.

Regards all,

John

John Gaskill
jg_at_info-central-usa.com
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Received on Thu May 31 2001 - 11:51:44 CDT