As my regular readers will know, I often share my own online experiences
in my articles in the hope that it will help some of you. As my regular
readers also know, despite the fact that I have achieved a degree of
success with my Internet ventures, I can be pretty lazy when it comes to
the more mundane aspects of running an online business. It is usually
these 'boring' tasks that end up saving or making me large sums of money
(when I eventually get around to dealing with them!). One day I will
learn..... :-)
This week, the incredibly boring job that I want to talk about is ad-tracking.
Now please bear with me on this - I know it isn't the most exciting
topic in the world BUT spending (literally) five minutes on this task a
month ago is already saving me over $750 a month (that's $9,000 a year!)
and there is every possibility that I could end up saving more than
double that amount!
Like many website owners, I use pay-per-click search engines to promote
some of my businesses. I am sure you are all familiar with this type of
advertising but if not, you basically have your website advertised in
the search results of a particular search engine and every time a
browser clicks on your advert, you pay the search engine a set fee (anything
from 5 cents upwards). The amount you pay is governed by how popular the
search keyword that you are listed under is. For example, search terms
such as 'hosting' or 'casinos' etc are very competitive and could cost
you several dollars a click (that is just for someone to visit your site
- they don't have to buy anything!). As you can see, it can get very
expensive.
Anyway, back to my story....
One of the most popular search engines to advertise on in the above way
is Google, using their Adwords service. Adwords are the paid adverts
that show up on the right-hand side of the Google search engine
listings. I have been using Google Adwords for years on and off but more
recently I have only been using this service to advertise a couple of my
main websites. The reason being that these sites have high sales
conversion ratios (the number of people that visit the sites and
actually buy something) and therefore I can justify the relatively high
advertising cost.
Both of these sites were receiving good levels of traffic from Google
Adwords and both were making proportionate levels of sales. Of course,
the sites also receive traffic from many other sources but I assumed
that as Google had always provided me with visitors that bought, that
this was still the case. The bottom line was that if my PPC costs were
way lower than my sales costs on each day, then I was basically happy
:-)
A few months ago, Google introduced a new tool which allows you to track
the visitors that they were sending you through your advertising with
them. The ad tracking tool is very easy to install and requires you to
place a small piece of HTML code on your 'thank-you' pages (for example,
the confirmation of order page that a customer will only see if they
have purchased from you). Once installed, Google can track their
referrals and see how many of them actually make it to the 'thank-you'
page (ie. and make a purchase). The results are then displayed within
your normal Google Adwords stats.
Last month I had a spare five minutes so I installed the ad tracking
tool on one of my sites, expecting to find that I was correct in my
assumption that a good percentage of these referrals from Google were
buying from me. I was initially very surprised to see that over the
first few days, hardly any of the referrals were making purchases but I
put this down to an 'off-week' and let the adverts continue to run.
In the end, I tracked this specific ad for a month and the conversion
rate from the Adwords referrals was appalling - seriously, I really
couldn't believe it. The site WAS making sales but hardly any of the
buyers were coming from the Google paid adverts. The fact was that the
sales were covering the cost of the Adwords advertising but I was
basically wasting money because this advertising was in no way
whatsoever as effective as it had been in the past.
Result?
I stopped that advertising campaign after tracking it for a month and
guess what? The level of sales on the site in question has remained
constant but I am now saving over $750 a month by not paying for the
Adwords advertising.
I am now tracking a second site in the same way and whilst the results
so far show that the conversion rate is higher than the first site, it
is still not as high as I would have expected so I may well end up
ditching this campaign also and that will save me considerably more
money each month!
The moral of this story? Well, it's obvious really but it is absolutely
vital that you track your paid advertising to see how effective it
really is. You may well be surprised (as I was) and if it saves you a
few hundred dollars a month, I can assure you it is a very nice surprise
:-)