Is Your Advertising Making You Money Or Is It An Outright Loser? Can You Even Tell?

 Have you just met one of your advertising dollars flying out the door? Do you know whether it will be returning, bringing plenty of company with it or whether it will be lost for ever?

The correct and winning answer of course is that you are entirely confident that your dollar will be returning and that you know almost to the exact cent the amount of company it will have. But, hand on heart, can you say that you are one of the small percentage of small and home business owners who can truly give that answer?

Or are you like the rest of us who identify with that well known quote, variously attributed to different eminent manufacturers at the beginning of the 20th century, " I know that half of my advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half". According to one marketing expert (one of the few that I do trust) the true situation is even worse and as much as 90% or more of all advertising loses money.

In today's multi-media world we have got an even bigger range of options available to us, both offline and online, in which to advertise our business. Some options are truly and horrendously expensive and some are ostensibly low cost.

A once off expensive campaign may be brilliantly successful or a dismal failure and you will be immediately aware off which it is. On the other hand, if you continue to repeat it time after time, low cost but ineffective advertising will quietly eat away at your budget until none is left.

Knowing which advertising options are working for you and which are not has large implications not just for your bottom line but even for the survival of your business. Doesn't that worry you? Shouldn't you be concerned? Again the truth is that, if you are like most of us, you are concerned but don't really know what to do.

You have heard the mantra that when it comes to advertising you should "test, test, and test again". You know it is most likely true but, courtesy of all the marketing gurus who keep repeating the mantra, you also suspect that all this testing is a complicated process and requires deep pockets.

Need it be so? After all, all you really need to know is:

 how good a particular advertisement is in attracting potential customers (whether number of enquiries or numbers of visitors to a web site);

 how well the stream of potential customers converts in terms of number of sales achieved;

 how much the advertisement cost;

 your profit after costs are deducted;

 whether it was worthwhile, in other words the return on your investment.

And that is it. You can get this information using a simple spreadsheet. That may be more than adequate if you are running but a handful of ads over relatively short time scales.

However, if you want to run ads in a variety of media at different times and for different durations (because you want to test of course!) then I for one feel like tip toeing away at the thought of all the work involved in constantly having to edit and update such a spread sheet, let alone the effort then required to make sense of it all.

Fortunately there is a solution, in the form of Ad Tracking programs. No longer the preserve of the big marketing companies, many ad tracking programs are now surprisingly affordable

Ad trackers let you identify immediately the ads that are best at attracting potential customers and, depending on the software, will calculate conversion rates and your return on investment.

The more sophisticated of the Ad Trackers can even make testing fun! Now that is a word which you might not normally associate with this activity.

Imagine the quality and value of the information you would have if, for your web site and without having to create new landing pages for each ad you are running, you could:

 identify not just the number of unique visitors generated by any one ad but how often these visitors return;
 identify the web addresses your visitors have come from to visit yours (wouldn't it be a surprise to find that other web sites are sending you more visitors than your own ads are!);
 track your visitors' actions on your site. Are they looking and leaving, staying a while, taking you up on your free offer, subscribing to your newsletter or (hurrah!) making a purchase?;
 find out how well visitors respond to an ad over time (poor response to a designer sunglasses offer in the depths of winter may suggest you need to pause your ad for a few months!);
 have all the relevant statistics served up at the touch of a button?

There is a free e-book which you can download by clicking here which gives you tons more of ideas on the information you can gather with ad trackers including the fun you can have with tweaking your ad copy and then tracking the effects of this. That is another subject for another day.

Right here and now though there is one area where Ad Trackers can really save your skin and that is with what I call the "Road to Riches - Road to Ruin" strategy or Pay Per Click advertising.

For the small and home business owner, Pay per Click is like Nirvana; just pick your keywords, write you ad , fork out some cash and your ad campaign is up and running on the internet in no time.

The customers simply click on the ad to be brought to you web site, like what they see and order, leaving you to pocket the profits. It is so easy, right? No it isn't.

If you are thinking of starting a Pay Per Click advertising campaign then you need to know it can fleece you of your budget in an instant without producing one single sale. (If this is the case, either you're starting out or have already been fleeced, then it would be a very wise move to read either this book at http://url123.com/bcam8 by Perry Marshall or this one at http://profits.cc/g-adwords.htm by Andrew Goodman - and if you want to cover your bases read both).

Whether you have already mastered Pay Per Click or not, and although there is quite a bit more to it, your choice of keywords for a PPC campaign is absolutely fundamental to your success.

A good and sophisticated Ad Tracker program, one of the best right now being Ad-Trackz, http://url123.com/bcuuq, is invaluable here as it can track the keywords which generate sales as opposed to those that don't, while giving you an entire Pay per Click analysis for each campaign.

Do you think that knowing and being able to quickly drop the keywords that are costing you a lot but producing low or no sales would save you a lot of money and anguish?. From having to go through the expense and anguish first we know that this is the case.

Whatever your advertising plans, if you really want an effective, money producing, strategy for your business then there is no question that you must have ad tracking in place. And with a small amount of initial work a good ad tracking program can even put your strategy almost entirely on auto pilot.

But after some time using an ad tracker program you may find, in fact, that none of your advertising is working and so you should stop it! Heresy of heresies though it may seem
advertising is but one part of the marketing mix after all. And advertising may not simply work, or not work very well, for your particular business.

According to the trusted marketing expert referred to above, so many of us run advertising because we feel we ought to or because all our competitors are doing so, even if these competitors are not making any money out of their advertising either.

So strangely enough a good ad tracker program may help you to kick over the traces and to decide that you will never advertise again - or more likely never advertise again in certain media!

Hang on to your Ad Tracker though you will need it to track the responses to your brochures, direct mail pieces, e-mail marketing, newsletters, articles, discount vouchers, referral scheme and all the other means of marketing to which you can now devote the money previously spent on advertising.

About the Author

Ellen Conneely is one of two partners in a small business located in Wales, UK. She has made all the mistakes she notes above. The light dawned one day when she discovered a competitor who has never advertised but is doing very well thank you! She is now concentrating on, and tracking of course, other ways of marketing.

 Ellen Conneely

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