Tracking Ad Results - Preliminary Case Study

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Tracking Ad Results – Preliminary Case Study

Posted by: John The Geek

I’m in the process of promoting a new membership site I’ve created. For the curious, it’s called Marketing Tech Secrets and you can get all the details about it here.

The purpose of this post is not to promote MTS (I did that already in an earlier post), but to demonstrate some of the things you can learn by tracking the results of your promotional efforts.

I currently use a total of 9 advertising sites each of which offers one or more of the following ad methods: text ads, banner ads, exit ads, or solo email ads. I have upgraded memberships in all but one of them.

I’ve been using these sites for months now to send out promotional emails and advertise affiliate products. I’ve been meaning to implement some kind of tracking mechanism and never got around to it. Now that I have my own product, it got pushed to the top of the priority list.

The system I’m using is very simple right now. Each link I use has a code appended to it which gets read by the landing page. The system simply counts the number of times a given code is seen and stores the counts in a database table.

Eventually, I’ll make it more sophisticated, but for now, it’s already giving me some interesting information. Primarily, it’s showing me how effective these ad sites are (or not) in terms of driving traffic to my site. Pretty important thing to know, right?

Here are the results from the past 12 days:

Text and Banner Ads

Site Name	Page Hits
Leads Leap	242
Target Ads Depot	94
Croc Ads	62
ViralURL	6
Free Ad Depot	5
Viral Ads Depot	3

Solo Email Ads

Site Name	Page Hits
List Joe *	135
ViralURL	87
Croc Ads	16
Viral Ads Depot	10
Free Traffic Buzz	7
Free Ad Depot	5
ListDotCom	5

* List Joe is a special case. The number looks really good compared to the other sites until you recall that List Joe is a credit-based safelist. That means that people click a link in the email they receive which displays my site for 20 seconds while the credit counter counts down to zero and the user gets credit for viewing my site. A very high percentage of those people probably never even look at the site, but the fact is that they’re at least opening it and it’s up to me to have something on there that grabs their attention.

Conclusions

Leads Leap is far and away the best deal for the money it costs me. I’m a Pro member of Leads Leap for which I pay them $27 per month. My text ads are seen in their newsletters and on their blog and they’re obviously effective as there were about two and a half times the number of hits on my page as the next most effective site.

Target Ads Depot was a distant second to Leads Leap, but still much better than most of the rest of the sites. I’m a lifetime Pro member of Target Ads Depot meaning that I paid once and I have a text ad, a banner ad, and an exit ad for life. The above results only reflect the text ad. So far, there haven’t been any hits on the banner or the exit ads.

Croc Ads did reasonably well in the text ads category. I’m a lifetime Pro member of Croc Ads which means I paid them once and I have two text ads free for life on their system. The results weren’t as impressive as Leads Leap, but only one of my two ads was for MTS.

Aside from List Joe, in the email category only ViralURL scored impressive results. I think that speaks volumes to the responsiveness of ViralURL members. Whereas List Joe‘s members are surfing for points, ViralURL members are actually opening up the emails and clicking on the links to visit the advertised site with no artificial incentive to do so.

I think this was the most interesting statistic of all of them. Where most of the email sites were pretty lame in terms of response, and List Joe‘s curve is skewed, it could be argued that my headlines or emails weren’t compelling enough to get people to open them. I think the ViralURL results refute that. The identical emails were sent to ViralURL as to the rest of the sites and obviously were interesting enough to get them to open them many times more often than the other sites. The only variable was the site and its members.

I hope the importance of doing at least minimal tracking of your promotional efforts is obvious. From these results I can see that only a few of the sites I use are giving me any kind of decent return on the effort I’m expending to use them. In most cases, I’m a paid up lifetime member so it’s not costing me additional money to use them. I’ll continue to use them, but the best performing sites will be the priority when I need to decide which sites I have time for in any given day.

John The Geek

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