Comments on: Learn From My Mistakes: Track Your ROI

By: Best of the ‘Sphere 21/1/08 | TechnoMoney | Smashing Blogging Tips

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 08:15:51 +0000

[...] Learn From My Mistakes: Track Your ROI from BloggingExperiment [...]

By: Rebecca Laffar-Smith

Rebecca Laffar-Smith — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:02:00 +0000

While hit to sale ratio might seem to make sense from a logical perspective it often doesn’t work out that way. The ROI from different ad streams can vary greatly. For example, say your post hits a home run on digg.com the hits you get will be huge but the bounce rate will be shockingly high. You don’t get a lot of repeat visitors from that spike. If the same thing happened on StumbleUpon you’d have a higher rate of return visitors. The difference is visitor quality.

In this case, the quality of the traffic matters. I would think ProBloggers review would have created more sales. The success of an advertising slot verses a review would be significantly different. In the review, a known expert and his regular readers are given a chance to dig deep into the content, check it out, and give readers their honest opinion. That is a verified endorsement from a big name.

The purchase of advertising space however is nothing alike. John Chow hasn’t given any recommendation for those ads. They flicker across the blog but there is no claim of affiliation or preference. It’s a paid picture. Yes, it would get hits, it might even have had more hits then Darren’s review but turning those hits into sales is a very different thing and becomes entirely dependant on the advertising lead in of the ad and the pages that follow pre-sale.

A review pre-sells an ad slot gets them looking.

By: Eric Vernon

Eric Vernon — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:48:21 +0000

Ah yes sorry. I’m relatively new to the world of web design, and I haven’t even thought about selling things via Internet, since for almost everything you have to be 18 for – and I don’t have the desire to screw with my parents’ taxes. But still, it might be a decent indicator of how many clicks each ad was getting, and that might clue you in on how much each ad is generation – e.g., if Ad 1 has 200 hits while Ad 2 has 100, it might be safe to assume that Ad 1 is also resulting in twice as many sales.

Just my opinion, again I’m no e-commerce guru.

By: Ben Cook

Ben Cook — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:42:21 +0000

@ Eric, I know which ads sent what traffic, however, the order process goes through PayPal. Obviously I don’t have the ability to put Google Analytics or other tracking code on those pages so I can’t tell which traffic source converted to sales. Know what I mean?

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:22:47 +0000

If the ads are linking to your site in some way, you don’t need a redirect.

Just have one ad go to one URL while the other goes to another, and don’t link to those URLs on your site. Have those be mirror pages and then see which is getting the hits.

By: SEO Blog

SEO Blog — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 13:34:12 +0000

At least now you know what you have to do . Tho tracking ROI since the very beginning could of save you some $ in the feature. But after all, everything is just great since you in any case gained subscriptions and you also covered the investment with the sales.

By: Emma

Emma — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:39:38 +0000

Ben thank-you, that’s great advice. I wouldn’t of thought to do that either. Emma

By: Cindy S

Cindy S — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:43:13 +0000

You can always send a follow up email to the people who bought your theme. Ask them if they are satisfied with it and oh, by the way, where did you see it advertised and what prompted you to buy it.

It’s good customer service to follow up. People love it and I always learn a little from it. At the Fortune 500 company I used to work for we asked them one question, Would you recommend it to a friend? Word of mouth is usually your best advertising in the long run.

By: How To Rule The World

How To Rule The World — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:12:32 +0000

ROI rule #1…. Track everything… including your tracking

By: Ron@TheWisdomJournal

Ron@TheWisdomJournal — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:40:40 +0000

Here’s a lesson I just learned: Verify that you typed your website URL correctly when commenting!

Love your site, Ben. I found it a few days ago and read it every day!