If you’ve been running your business for a while, then you’re well aware that marketing efforts can be difficult to track, especially when it comes to advertisements. If you’ve recently thought about or have already started putting your ads on the internet but are unsure how you should follow their performance, this article on how to check to see if your online ads are working is just for you.
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Keep Close Track of Your Sales
If you haven’t begun putting up ads yet, this method will be perfect for you. If you have started, you can still do this option as long as you’ve taken careful notes on how well your sales were doing before you started.
You need to begin by making a note of how sales are doing in general for a few weeks before the ads go up. Once they go live, track any changes that happen. Be sure to consider outside factors like holidays or local events that could have made their own impact.
Once the campaign is over, don’t stop tracking just yet. See how long it takes for any differences in sales to return to normal. With this info, you can get a rough idea of how well your ads brought in new customers.
See Who’s Visiting Your Site
There’s a good chance that the company you built your website through has a way to see how many people visit your site and how long they stay. But, if you really want to get all the details you can, you should look into using Google Analytics. It can tell you if your traffic is direct, organic, or referred from another source. You can then use this info to more accurately gauge who came from your ads.
Track Your Ad Conversions
As great as the above option sounds, it’s still not the most direct way to see who is clicking through on your ads. That would be done by tracking your ad conversions. Most companies that use ads allow you to see how well they’re doing. Amazon’s ad service, in particular, lets you use one of many different KPI formulas to track your ads and pay according to their success rate.
Provide a Survey
Even though our final way to check to see if your online ads are working is considered a bit old-school, we still wanted to include it due to its effectiveness. It’s the classic online survey. Unfortunately, many consumers avoid these like the plague, so you’ll have to get creative with it. The key is to not directly call it a survey and keep it short.
All you want to know in this case is how they came across your product today. If you ask them and give them a short list to choose from after they finish checking out, you’ll know for sure if your ads are the cause of your uptick in sales. Obviously, you won’t catch them all, but it’s the most direct way to find out.
