Oct 12 2008
The Importance of Tracking Clicks
Conversion is the objective of advertising and sales. Your ads must convert to visitors and your sales pages must convert to profit. The process of advertising is to write better ads so the conversion rate is high enough to deliver the amount of visitors you need to make a sale. Your sales page must be compelling enough to make adequate sales that pay for ads and operating costs with profit left over.
There is a process that when applied will produce a profitable combination. Once the combination of sufficient ad and sales conversion is achieved, the amount of your profit can be increased according to your advertising budget.
Ads can appear as text, graphics or a combination of both. Basic ad copywriting includes a headline, claim, benefit, reason, proof and call to action. However, depending upon the size of the ad there may not be enough room to include all elements. The smallest text ads are displayed in search engine or PPC advertising and the smallest IAB graphic ad size is 88 x 31 pixel micro bar.
In order to know that an ad converts to clicks you need to track and record results. Secondly, to improve your ad click rate you need to compare or split test at least two ads enough times to determine which ad works best. Each time a comparative test is run, a better ad will be discovered, and the value of your advertising increases.
The cost of search advertising is measured buy what you Pay Per Click (PPC). Each time an ad appears for a specific time or number of clicks it is called a campaign. Campaign costs are usually measured as cost per thousand or CPM. One way to keep campaign costs low until you have collected enough data to increase your ad spend is to set a daily budget.
Although most search engines include campaign metrics for their advertisers additional tracking is important to gather more specific data that is relevant to your split or multivariate testing. For example, you may be testing the same ad in more than one search network so you need to know where the click came from.
Tracking codes can be very long and text advertising very short. In order to keep links shorter, increase ad keyword density, and include a tracking code, a popular solution is to use a redirect. For example, your link in the ad would look something like http: //yourdomain.com/keyword. The location of the redirect on your site would be a subdirectory called keyword. In the keyword subdirectory you place a redirect code in the index file that contains your tracking link.
When someone clicks on the link in your ad the visitor is sent to the subdirectory named keyword, the tracking code is triggered, and the visitor is then redirected to your landing page. Good tracking software not only counts clicks but can also track campaign ad sources, and other valuable information like visitor IP and what keyword was used to find the ad.
In the next article I will discuss the importance of testing sales pages. In the mean time you may want to have a closer look at the tracking and testing software I use – Click Here.
business, PPC 
The graphic shown here is from page 10 of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) 2007 
