Taking the Mystery Out of Marketing
Internet marketing is often a mysterious topic that business owners face with skepticism. You know how a print ad works: You give a publication your creative, and you know you’ll be able to see it on a certain page of that publication. With the internet, you know you want more visitors to your website and you know what words you’d like them to find you for in the search engines, but how do you get from these ideas to results? How do you know it’s going to work when no one has a guarantee with Google? While internet marketing is certainly a less familiar form of marketing than print or television advertising, there’s much more certainty and far fewer guesses with this type of marketing than with traditional marketing.
Traditional Media
When advertising in traditional media, you definitely do know you are guaranteed to see your ad, but you can gain only approximate statistics about what really matters – your reach, and most importantly, your results.
With print advertising, you can tell how many people generally see a publication. But did people look at the page that had your ad on it? Did everyone that received the issue with your ad look at it at all? With a television ad, you can estimate how many people watch during the time your ad will show, but did potential customers walk out of the room during the commercial break?
Sure, you know where you can find the ad and you can see it. While this may make you feel secure, it doesn’t really benefit you and your business. Concerning the impact of your ad, unless you require customers to mention a specific offer in your ad, the only way to gauge the success of your ad is an increase in customers after you ran your ad. There are several factors that could influence this increase, as well.
Internet Marketing
What would you think if you could know exactly how many people saw your ad? And even better, who actually contacted you or purchased something from you based on this ad? What steps did this customer take before this final step?
Well, that doesn’t sound so mysterious, does it? That’s more than you’ll ever know from the television or print ad, but it’s just a portion of what you can find out through internet marketing.
Advertising on websites or in thesponsored listings in the search engines can tell you exactly this data. And tracking your website can tell you anything you want to know – likely much more than you’d even know what to do with. See how many visitors came to your site, how many visited more than once, what pages they looked at, how long they looked at them, where they came from, what words they typed into the search engine to find your site, what steps they took before taking action on your site or even what step prevented them from taking action.
Website tracking may not tell you exactly how many people will see your ad before you launch a campaign, but it does provide statistics about your results, and isn’t that why you’re marketing your business in the first place?
