Archive for July, 2008

Jul 27 2008

Internet Traffic Efficiency

Published by Brian under Traffic

The more traffic you get, combined with the more money you can make for each person that sees your offer, is why it’s so important to optimize your ads, and your entire sales process. Contrary to what some advertising may claim, it’s not the traffic that counts, it’s how targeted that traffic is. Furthermore, conversion efficiency is never efficient because it can always be improved. This is the subtle difference between sales and outstanding sales.

The more people that see your ads, the more clicks and visitors you’ll get. The more visitors you get, the more product you will sell. The more efficient your sales process is, the more visitors you will convert. That’s why knowing how to generate and convert traffic for your business is so important.

Although simple in concept, it takes time to set up ad networks, as well as test and refine an optimized ad campaign. Yes, it does seem slow to begin but remember, that once you have established channels of ad distribution and learned how to track, test, and refine your ads, sales pages, and offers, what follows will become easier, faster and more effective as your skills grow.

Cutting costs are an important part of getting a higher return on investment. So that’s why starting small helps to ease the pain of growth while you’re setting up and learning the skills of Internet traffic efficiency. Regardless of where you are on your business-building path, there will always be some new information to consider.

One of the techniques I use to help organize my activities is a list. So here’s a list of considerations I’ve cobbled together for this article that has an effect on traffic efficiency.

  • Find and cut ad deals with website publishers specific to your product niche
  • Optimize your ads to get more clicks/visitors
  • Create enticing landing pages that give people a reason to give you their name, email address, and phone number and capturing as many of these when people go thru your sales process.
  • Install and optimize automatic follow up systems to monetize and close these hot prospects using auto responders.
  • Increase conversion rates on the entire sales process
  • Increase conversion rates on the follow up systems
  • Add a simple up sells that increase profits
  • Sell more products to existing customers/prospects
  • Monetize your lists (these lists are golden)
  • Monetize your exit traffic
  • Identify where your competition is buying traffic, buy there and convert that traffic better
  • Increase your revenues by testing and optimizing subject lines
  • Build strong COREG leads and sales processes that turn those leads into buyers
  • Get mass distribution with the CPA networks that drive thousands of orders on auto pilot
  • Get traffic from the major Ad networks that have access to thousands of sites and can send millions of visitors on a monthly basis
  • Buy all kinds of ads including banners, pops, interstitials, email drops, newsletter sponsorships, CPV campaigns, COREG, text ads, etc…

These are some of the money making activities you need to be focusing on. One of the more important things is to make sure you are using the right metrics when optimizing your campaign. This activity is very different from search engine marketing and understanding the right metrics is key to Internet traffic efficiency.

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Jul 20 2008

Why An Ad Server Determines Your Marketing Success

Published by Brian under Marketing, Traffic

Your ad server is one of the most powerful tools for internet marketing because it allows publishers and advertisers to serve, target, split test and track all kinds of different ads. The ad server acts as a command center for Internet marketing, to see and control all of your traffic. Data supplied by the ad server enables quick and easy analysis of the effectiveness of all your ads, campaigns, and traffic sources.

Not only can you see how many times the ad was viewed (impressions) but also know how many of these impressions converted into clicks, and how many of these clicks converted into sales for every single ad placed in rotation. This makes it very easy to test headlines and calls to action to quickly find out what works. Moreover, as you may already know, having the right headline can double even triple your conversion rates.

When you can quickly see which traffic sources are making the most money, then you know which traffic sources deserve an increase your ad budget. By rotating and testing different ads, you can see what headlines and copy is working best. An ad server delivers all the reports and intelligence you need to identify which traffic sources and creatives are either losing or making money.

Ad server reports will give you all the key numbers you need to make critical decisions based on the data and not your emotions or logic. A common mistake marketers make is to rely on the ad networks to serve their ads and rely on them to optimize the campaign. Relying on an ad network to serve and manage your campaign is like having someone else look after your pet. No one is going to care as much as you do.

Without using an ad server, you forego one of the most essential Internet marketing tools available. Here are some of the main things to look for when choosing ad server software or service provider:

1. Post Click Tracking – You want to make sure that you can track and optimize on post click actions like sales, opt-ins, etc. One of the best ways to optimize a campaign is by Earnings per thousand or eCPM.

2. Custom Reports – You want to make sure you can run custom reports on more than just impressions and clicks. You need to be able to see how much money was spent and how much profit was made with each traffic source and creative that you have in rotation.

3. Flexible Payouts – When you buy traffic you encounter publishers that sell their traffic not just on a CPM or CPC basis but also for a flat sponsorship rate, a CPV, or even CPA basis. So the ad server should allow for these different types of payouts to be entered into the system, otherwise it becomes a headache having to calculate the numbers reported to figure out if you are profiting or not.

4. Custom Optimization – You want the ability to optimize your campaigns other than by CTR because an ad has the highest click through rate does not necessarily mean it’s the most profitable ad and the one getting sales at the lowest cost per sale. Make sure you can create custom optimizers and have the ability to custom optimize the campaign according to whatever your campaign goals are. If your goal is to optimize the campaign to get the most possible sales at the lowest possible cost like it is for most marketers then you need to have the ability to optimize by eCPM.

5. Advanced Targeting – Some vendors offer advanced targeting features like behavioral targeting, remarketing, day part targeting etc. that will really make a big difference to your numbers.

It is very important that you have full control of serving and optimizing your ads. That’s why having your own ad server is key. In this business you can’t try to guess what’s working and what’s not – you have to know exactly what changes you need to do to your ads to make the campaign profitable.

Bottom line is that an ad server is a must if you want to profit big time. Make sure you do your homework before signing a contract and that the ad serving solution is going to be able to meet your need. A popular free ad server software is called OpenX - http://www.openx.org/

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