C Shaffstall

Now that I’ve explained how to create a campaign, let’s look at tracking our effectiveness.

Google has a free collection of software applications called webmaster tools. Ideally, and considering that you are likely a small company, you have in-house control over your web site. If you don’t, it’s a good thing to consider.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, take a Dreamweaver class and take responsibility for your site. You do not have to be a designer to have a well-designed and easy-to-navigate site. Most sites are based on templates, so if your templates are already done then adding new pages is usually very manageable. If it’s not based on a template, consider switching to one. There’s lots to choose from at Template Monster.

Assuming that you can get to your site there are two must haves that you can install yourself. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for submitting site maps. For now, we’ll focus on the analytics because this is how we will check the effectiveness of our campaign. (If someone else has control, they may already be using these tools, you just need to request the reports.)

To use Google Analytics you must first install the tracking code. This is auto-generated for you when you create a Google Analytics account and add your web site. It does not require a great deal of know now. Just copy and paste the tracking code into your web pages.

Web pages are divided into two main sections: the head and the body. These areas are designated with opening and closing tags that look like this < head >  and < / head > and < body > and < / body >. The Google Analytics tracking code should be pasted right before the closing, or last, body tag (very near the bottom of the page).

If you do not have Dreamweaver, or aren’t yet convinced that you need to modify your own pages, you can still see these tags (but you cannot modify them). Using any browser, go to any page in your web site. From the view menu choose view source. This will display the native HTML codes that generate your page. Scroll to the bottom and you will be able to find the closing body tag and this is where you would past the analytics tracking code.

Once your pages have tracking codes you will be able to visit the Google Analytics web page and learn all sorts of really useful information about your site and your site’s visitors. Most importantly for the purpose of our first foray into SEO and SMO, we will watch the number of visitors that our campaign has generated.

Remember that I suggested you have a unique landing page for your campaign? This may be more clear now. If you send an email to your customers with a special offer, but then have a link to your home page, you will not be able to look at these stats and figure out which visitors navigated to your home page due to the email they received. A unique landing page with 100 visitors tells you something. It tells you that 100 people thought enough of your message to actually click through.

Another thing you can check is the amount of time the visitors spend on the landing page. If the page has links to other pages — pages that help your customer to drill down onto a specific form of the offer — you will learn even more.

Another trick that I use is to randomly divide my email list into four groups and send a slightly different message to each group. One message might say 25% off; another, save $25 off a $100 purchase; a message for buy one get the second half off; and the last could be free shipping. Each would have a different landing page. The division enables me to evaluate the effectiveness of how the offer is presented — even though the dollar value of the four offers is very similar.

Assuming that you created these random groups, and that you are monitoring your analytics, let’s say that landing page with a $25 savings resulted in 5% click-through rate (the percentage of people who clicked the link in the offer), the others were 4%, 3.5%, and .05%, respectively. With the results now in, you’re ready to send your second offer, but now you know exactly how to present the offer given the response rates from the first campaign.

Sending an offer out all by itself won’t generally get you a lot of search-engine optimization, it’s the supporting work that’s going to get you noticed. 

Since this is a really great offer, we know that it’s newsworthy. That means we need to send out a news release. Sign up at a news site and post a free news release. I like FreePressRelease.com, but there are a number of them. Bloggers and news organizations subscribe to these services so that they are auto notified someone posts a news release using the keywords or meta tags they are watching.

You’ll find that the better the offer, the more likely it is that the story will get picked up and the news spread. This gives you a wider reach and even more success. That’s really what we all want, right?