You Blinded Me With Science

You Blinded Me With Science!

by Marc Goldman

Without a doubt, Claude Hopkins is someone that all modern marketers owe a debt of gratitude to.

Claude Hopkins, for those of you who don't know, was a famous advertising copywriter in the late 19th & early 20th century. Claude is credited with inventing scientific marketing (and also making other businessmen millions and millions of dollars). Claude Hopkins believed thoroughly in testing copy, couponing, premiums, free samples, and mail order. He was an advertising phenomenon.

I think Claude would have loved the internet. He would have had the ultimate testbed and the technology available at his fingertips to make him and his clients millions and millions of dollars in a short space of time. Most marketers, (both newbies and seasoned vets alike) miss the boat completely when it comes to scientific marketing.

They seem to think that you write an ad or a sales letter, throw it up on a webpage or in an ezine and then just see what happens.

I see this everyday, lots of advertisers (especially big corporations) know absolutely nothing about testing their advertising copy. Everyday I receive an ezine or come across a website where scientific marketing is being completely ignored! Instead of using an ad tracker to test the responsiveness of their ads, someone is paying for expensive advertising and just throwing in their url blindly.

It's kind of sad - but not really surprising. You see not many people know about tracking their ads. They don't know why you would do it and they certainly don't have any clue how to do it.

So let's focus on why you would want to track your ads:

As my friend, Harvey Segal says on his website ad-tracking.com: If you spend money on advertising but don't track the results then you are simply throwing money away.

That's why ad tracker programs were originally developed, to identify where the hits to your web site are coming from, so that

* you can eliminate all advertising that is not working

* and run more ads that are making you profits

Simply put and an excellent explanation as well. If you spend any money at all on advertising and don't track your ads, you might as well take your dollars and light them on fire - it would be faster and accomplish the same feat.

You see, advertising, as Claude Hopkins would say, is salesmanship in print. If you are trying to achieve the absolute most profitability for your products and services, you must craft ads, salesletters, solo mailings that list the benefits of whatever you are selling and those ads, salesletters, etc. must reach your target market.

Once you find an ad that is working you will want to roll out that ad to a wide source of media (ezines, websites, magazines etc). Now to do all that takes money, a great deal of money. So if you were to invest a lot of money in advertising, wouldn't you want to know what ads can make you the most money? It's called Return on Investment. Getting the greatest amount of profit in proportion to the amount of money you spend on advertising.

There is only one way to determine what advertising will produce the greatest return on your investment - that is to craft several benefit filled ads, test them in low cost media sources (either banner exchanges if testing banner advertising, or low cost ezines for ezine advertising). Then find out which ad is producing the most profit, drop all the others and rollout a full scale advertising campaign.

Do you know how to test your ads effectiveness? In the old days, you would have to create different copies of your webpage (I still see some companies do this) for each place you advertised but a much more effective way to test your ads effectiveness is to utilize ad tracking software. Ad tracking software allows you to You just replace the URL that you want to place in your ad with a 'tracking' URL which the ad tracking program will give you.

Here is an example of how to use ad tracking software.

Suppose you want to run an ad campaign by placing an ad in the test ezine newsletter for a product you are selling at www.domain.com

You would choose a specific tracking code unique to this campaign, for example testezine. The software will produce a new URL - a tracking URL - and this is the one that you would place in the ad.

Here is an example of what a tracking url would look like:

http://www.domain.com/content/go.php?id=3&c=62&ac=testezine

This would redirect to http://www.domain.com

So now when someone reads that ad and clicks on the new URL they will be taken to http://www.domain.com and the ad tracking system will register that the click came from the test ezine newsletter.

Now you can determine how many people came from the test ezine newsletter and (if the tracking software you use is sophisticated enough) you can determine how much profit you made from your particular advertising investment.

So, now that you know why you would track your ads and you have some idea of how to track your ads, which software do you choose to do the job? There are many choices on the market and that is good. Choice will allow you to invest your money wisely in a solution that makes life easy for you (and helps you to make the most money).

Since all trackers do the same thing (track your advertising efforts) here is a checklist for you to go through when evaluating the available solutions:

Are you able to set up and run as many campaigns as you want and not be charged for the amount of clicks you receive. Believe it or not, some companies actually charge you for having a successful campaign!

You should be able to set up your campaigns to track:

* leads
* sales
* subscribers
* downloads
* traffic generators

You should know what ads are working without having to run any complicated reports so you can get a quick overview of your campaigns. But the software should also have extensive reporting if you want it.

Instead of setting up a separate tracker for each campaign you should be able to set up one tracking campaign and use different ad codes to immediately test the effectiveness of your ads.

That way you can run ads in multiple ezines and only change one field for example:

http://www.domain.com/content/go.php?id=3&c=62&ac=testezine1 http://www.domain.com/content/go.php?id=3&c=62&ac=testezine2 http://www.domain.com/content/go.php?id=3&c=62&ac=testezine3 http://www.domain.com/content/go.php?id=3&c=62&ac=testezine4

Most importantly, you should be able to change your campaigns on the fly: this means that you should have the ability to switch your redirect urls in an instant even if you are in the middle of a campaign.

Only one software allows you to do all the above and more and that is the Pitbull Campaign manager - a member of the Ultimate Marketers Resource family of tools.

Click Here for more info

Now that you know a little about scientific marketing, you should want to get out there immediately and start tracking your advertising efforts. As time goes on, you will want to track absolutely everything, how many clickthroughs it takes to make a sale, how much traffic a banner ad campaign will bring, how many people clicked on links in your ezine. There is no limit to what can be tracked and once you start tracking everything, you will not remember what it was like beforehand.

Get out there and lets make Claude proud!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Article by Marc Goldman, Goldbar Enterprises. Our web site offers Top Quality, Easy To Use, Affordable Online Tools To Help You Build, Promote & Grow Your Business - All In One Place! Visit The Ultimate Marketers Resource at http://www.goldbar.net/lsa/c.cgi/websuccess before your competitors do.