If I wanted to do advertising using traditional methods, I'd need to spend thousands of dollars printing & mailing advertising that may or may not be effective. I won't know until weeks later, after the sales start to roll in. (Or worse, after they DON'T roll in!) Not so with the internet. You can know in a matter of hours, not weeks, whether your internet advertising campaign is effective. Then you can use these results to make it even better.
If you buy online advertising to drive traffic to your site, you can measure EVERYTHING, and quickly learn what works and what doesn't.
The best way to continually improve your website advertising is to provide A-B Split Tests on everything you do? your ads AND your landing pages. (Landing pages are the pages on your website that your ads point to.) Then carefully track the results. One of your advertising ideas will usually prove to be significantly better than the other. The better ad is now your ?control? and you can create new advertising ideas to serve as ?tests.? Pull the poorer performing ad, and replace it with your new advertising campaigns. Then test again. If the new internet advertising campaign beats your control, it stays, and the old control is replaced with a new test. This will help sharpen your advertising, and begin to discover trends that work. You can even use the data from your advertising testing to improve advertising ideas, and then confidently run these newly polished in print publications.
You should conduct the same type of A-B Split Tests on your landing pages. Test different headlines. Test different ways of collecting information. Test colors. Test ad copy. Then measure the results, to see which page produces more results. When you buy website advertising, you can usually request that they point your ads to multiple landing pages for testing purposes ? don't be afraid to ask.
This article contributed by --Leveraging powerful results for small business leaders.
