Web Site Prelaunch Promotion Case Study

The following are the results of promoting a new membership site I’ve created over a 21-day period prior to the official launch. The site is called Marketing Tech Secrets and you can get all the details about it here, if you’re interested.

The purpose of this post is not to promote MTS so much as to demonstrate some of the things you can learn by tracking the results of your promotional efforts. In my previous post on this subject, I laid out the results of the first 12 days of promoting the site. The landing page for the promo was an abbreviated version of the current sales page with a form at the bottom for people to sign up for the pre-notification list, if they chose to.

This post details the results after 21 days. The site has now gone live and the prelaunch page is no longer visible.

As I said earlier, 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.

The tracking 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 21 days of the prelaunch:

Text and Banner Ads

Solo Email Ads

* 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

Basically, except for the differences in total numbers, the conclusions from the first 12 days have held up through the entire three-week period. I’ve repeated them below for those who haven’t seen the preliminary results post.

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 nearly five 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 are improved over the initial numbers because I used both text ads for MTS over the last week or so.

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 very 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.

The message should be obvious: test, test, and test again. You can’t have too much information about where your ad results are coming from. The more you know about how your various ad providers are performing, the better you will be able to allocate your advertising resources.

John The Geek

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