Tracking your Advertising Methods

You have advertised in multiple newspapers or newsletters. But when the sales start coming in, how to you know where the customer saw your ad? How can you determine which methods worked best for you?

If you are getting sales information through email, and you have your own domain name, set up different email addresses for each ad. For instance you could have sales2@yourdomain.com, sales3@yourdomain.com and so on. Try and avoid the number one in any of your addresses, as most will think it is the letter "L" instead. Your web host should be able to forward messages from all your email addresses to your main address. Then, simply look at your header to see which address the email was originally sent to.

If you are selling mail order style and getting payments through the mail at your house, add an extra line such as "Unit 1" or "Suite A" underneath your street address. The mail will still be delivered correctly it to your house, and it is an easy and free way to know what ads the payments are coming from.

If you are directing people to your website, be sure you have a proper tracking system set up so you know how many people visit your site, as well as each individual page. The best tracking programs will even tell you individual IP addresses, and what page / link they visited you from.

Then, set up several pages that will automatically forward to the actual content page. For instance, one ad I ran sent people to http://www.mymommybiz.com/babygap/ but that actually forwarded each visitor to the true page at http://www.mymommybiz.com/ebooks/babygap.html within a few seconds. When I viewed the statistics for my site, this enabled me to determine which visitors to my site where as a result of that one ad, as opposed to just general visitors to my site.

These methods will help you learn which ads are producing the most sales, and which are duds. You may discover that $2000 ad in the national magazine produces less sales than your $25 ad in your local parenting magazine.

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