High TECH Ad Campaigns: Four Easy Steps to Making More Money Online - Tracking and Exposure
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Tracking
Tracking merely means that you find out whether or not each click in your campaign eventually turned into a lead or a sale (and if it became a sale, how much money did that click make for you). There are dozens of programs online that will do this for you. One of the most popular ones is ClickTracks. It is billed as a marketing tool, not a web developer tool like many other pieces of software around. It gives great ROI tracking reports, and has many features that will let you intelligently tweak your website based on the navigation path of your customers. Another program, that can help is Keyword Max. It provides basic but strong ROI tracking from a web-based format. Both of these programs and many others will tell you how much each keyword spent and how much money it made. For example, you could tell from them that the word “Framed Art” spent $10 giving you 200 clicks from marketing on Google and it made a $120 sale so your $12 ROI for every dollar invested in that keyword. With information like this for every keyword, you’ll be on your way to tracking the most important stats for your campaigns. If you cannot afford or do not find these programs to your liking, you can always use the Google and Overture provided conversion tracking. These features will not provide the amount of the sale to you, but they will provide you with the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for each customer who actually buys something from you or fills out a lead form. From there you can make the same general (but not as lucid or confident) extrapolations about your campaigns.
Exposure
Exposure is the second step of the TECH-nique to a strong ad campaign. Exposure means getting enough information to make a statistically confident decision about a campaign’s results. To get adequate exposure for your overall campaign, you need to forget the mantra “less is more.” More is better when it comes to the number of keywords in your campaign. Choose as many related keywords as possible when you start. Use Google’s Keyword Selector Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox) and Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). Type in very broad phrases that describe your product, hit enter, and it will tell you more words that relate to it using the language that people actually use to search for them. For example, if you type in “coins” Google will produce a list such as the one below:
- coins
- gold coins
- us coins
- rare coins
- old coins
- silver coins
- roman coins
- american coins
- ancient coins
- euro coins
- coins value
- greek coins
- state coins
- states coins
- dollar coins
- coins for sale
- canadian coins
- value of coins
- chinese coins
- two coins
- foreign coins
- valuable coins
- antique coins
The only difference between this sample list and the full Google list is that the full list is about ten times longer!
Put all of the words of which you can think up. Bid them at the minimum bid. Gradually raise the bids until you start getting enough clicks on them that you can apply the Law of Large Numbers and safely make decisions about their true ROI attributes. The Law of Large Numbers in layman’s terms says that once you have thirty six of any single action, then you can reasonably predict that these attributes will stay the same. If you get three conversions for every thirty six clicks on the word “widgets,” then you can assume that that word will, all else equal, convert similarly for the rest of its life. That is not to say that for every thirty six clicks, you will get three sales. It is to say that in the long-run (hundreds, thousands, and millions of clicks), you can expect similar results. Think about it like this. If you flip a coin three times and get three heads, you know that probably just got lucky because a coin’s true heads to tails ratio is fifty percent (actually it’s 51% heads, but you need a lot of time on your hands to do that experiment!). If you flip the coin ten times though and get heads every time, then you are probably really surprised. If you flip the coin thirty six times though and get all heads, then you can reasonably say something irregular is happening with the coin.
Use the data from the tracking programs to find keywords that have produced sales with both a strong ROI and that have also at least thirty six clicks. These are the words that you will call “power” terms. These power terms will be the most important part of the next step in making your high-TECH campaign.
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