The beauty of IM is that every advertisement you place can be monitored. For example every click that comes to your website can be tracked. For instance, you can track pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements down to the level of the keywords that the searcher typed in to find your ad. Proceeding a step further, you are able to track the consequent sale coming from that click. Irrespective of whether you're using gratis or paid advertising to get traffic to your website, it is crucial to be able to measure the effects of your campaign.



As a business organisation, you must know your return on investment (ROI) for your advertising campaigns. In the realm of offline advertising such as newsprint or magazine classified advertisements, you'll frequently find that advertisers apply a different section number or postal box for each advert. They use the same mailing address just adding another departmental code. In this way, they can track how different advertisements perform based on the enquiries that get directed to the different sections.

This works as well for the 800 numbers that you call to get more information about merchandise that you've seen or learned about. Companies can establish different toll-free numbers for each advertisement and that's how they can monitor the effectiveness of multiple advertising campaigns. In offline promotion, it's much more expensive to set up the tracking. Imagine the costs associated with arranging different phone numbers or multiple PO boxes.

In the internet world, however, tracking becomes inexpensive as you are able to implement it using an mixture of scripts or software programs. With pay-per-click advertising, you are able to easily use a simple PHP script to enable you to capture the keywords coming from a Google search referral - not to mention Google analytics.

Let's examine another example. With a lot of web hosting packages, you're allowed to create multiple email addresses. You are able to set it up so that in each ad you use a different email address. Then when you get an email inquiry to a specific e-mail address, you'll know where that inquiry originated from. Another way to do this is to set up multiple subdomains to use as the link in your ads. For instance, if you're advertising in online newsletters, you are able to duplicate the same ad copy but send the readers to a different subdomain using a different URL for each ad.

When you're able to track the efforts of all your advertising, you can sit down at the end of the business month and work out which campaigns are generating the best ROI. You are then able to scale those campaigns or fine-tune them to try and maximise your profit. If you're not tracking), then you're simply flying blind and you're depending more on chance. Start tracking your advertising (campaigns today.