Posted by Ray White on October 8, 2009 Comments (0)

Each time you make a change in your marketing strategy, you need to evaluate the results of the change to determine whether or not it generated a greater profit for you. Tracking your results is important because it helps you determine what is working and what is not working.

Evaluating the response of your Internet marketing can be done in a number of different ways. This post will review 3 ways to track your advertising results.

Customer surveys

You can get all kinds of information from surveys. There are even services online that will help you with gathering the information. What you want to be sure to ask, though, is where your customers first heard about you. If you find a lot of your customers are learning about your products or services through a particular venue, you probably want to throw more time and effort into that specific method of advertising.

Embedded HTML coding

No, we aren’t talking about some sleazy spammy coding that downloads crap or steals visitor information. We are talking about third-party advertising that you probably use already to further monetize your website. Advertisements can be coded so the webmaster, you the business owner, receives feedback each time an Internet user clicks through a particular advertisement. If the business owner is using two different designs for his advertisements he may discover one design is attracting more attention than others and may make the decision to convert all of the advertisements to the more effective style. Similarly, a business owner who is running the same advertisement on several different web pages may discover he is receiving more traffic from one web page than from the others. He may also discover some web pages are not attracting much attention at all. Such information will help you decide what works and what doesn’t work for your business.

Website Statistics

Finally, the response to an Internet marketing campaign can be evaluated by carefully reviewing website traffic statistics. This information is useful because an unusual spike in the amount of website traffic immediately after implementing a stage of the marketing campaign can provide positive feedback that the change was well received by potential customers. While this method of evaluating the response to an Internet marketing campaign can be effective, it is important to note that making several changes at once will make it difficult to determine which changes were the most effective. It is important to only implement one major change at a time so that they can each be evaluated separately.

“Set and forget” is a nice idea, but in reality, you want to keep close tabs on how your advertising is doing. There is no better way to assert control over your business and your wallet.