You’ve just finished up a major marketing and advertising campaign using various types of media – newspapers, magazines, radio, network and cable television and Internet. Management of your company wants to know the results and the ROI from that campaign. Unfortunately, the only number you’ve got is the amount of money you spent and it’s necessary to find out if that money was spent effectively.
You know that your website has been search engine optimized and it is bringing in an acceptable level of focused, quality visitors.
You’re reviewing your web log files on a daily basis, looking for trends and patterns that would identify traffic generated from this last as campaign. While there is an increase in both traffic and sales volume, the question of how much is related directly to the campaign persists.
The last set of metrics available to you indicated that approximately 75-80% of your traffic was generated by search engine referrals. This is before the launch of the campaign.
The question that must be answered is how to measure the actual return on investment and provide management with the statistics they’re looking for while you are in the middle of a new campaign. If you want to know how much new traffic was generated by the ad campaign rather than total traffic, which will include those with their source in search engine results, you should consider creating a landing page specific to the campaign. If you do this you will be able to track the number of visitors coming in through that campaign and, at the same time, be able to track your program’s conversion rate.
How to make a landing page work for you.
In the greater scheme of website development, the pages that make up the website are connected directly to both the sitemap and the homepage. This configuration allows spiders and crawlers to index each of those pages and include them in the search engine database.
Effective landing pages fly in the face of this practice.
If you want to get accurate numbers from a landing page, the following must be true.
- Landing page is completely separate from both the sitemap and homepage.
- Landing page is protected from spiders and crawlers.
- Landing page cannot be directly reached by any visitors.
While common knowledge would have you do differently, there is no other way to get the number of visitors that reach that particular landing page because of an ad campaign. It’s impossible for someone simply surfing the Internet to get to that page. Now, in the real world, how does this help you gather the data you need?
Follow this example. Assume your company sells exercise equipment and you are going to begin an advertising campaign that will be national in scope. Your two new products are the “Posture Policeman” and the “Belly Buster Rotator.”
Before you even begin the campaign you need two new landing pages. One is for “Posture Policeman” and the other is for the “Belly Buster Rotator.” These two pages are absolutely, positively, stand alone pages that are not linked back to anything else on the website. When the campaign begins, the ads – regardless of the media used – will include the URLs for each page. The URLs must be displayed clearly and in large and bold fonts.
Since there is no way a visitor can get to these pages without using the specific URLs, it is reasonable to assume that any traffic on these pages was directed there through the ad campaign you are attempting to evaluate.
It is important to remember two different points. First, the robots.txt exclusion protocol must be installed and active. This will take these two pages out of reach of the spiders and crawlers and the number of visitors to your page will only be because of the ad campaigns. Second, these two URLs must appear only in the ad campaign material itself, nowhere else.
In summary –
Before you begin any ad campaign that you want to track, you must consider using these isolated landing pages from the start. It is necessary to set them up properly in the beginning in order to get meaningful results. You can expand this idea to include marketing efforts with a partner. If their website contains a link to yours, set the landing page up in the manner described above and you will be able to track that specific traffic also.
If you have updated tracking software or tools in place, you will most likely be able to calculate quickly the conversion rates of this specific traffic.
When you understand the principles in using isolated tracking pages, you can define several different applications for this. For example, you can isolate surveys and opinion polls and also conduct several location specific studies.
If you want to stay ahead of the pack in Internet marketing, add these tools and approaches to your tool kit. When you add them to aggressive SEO and positioning, you could find yourself well ahead of the game.
