Using Traffic Facts to measure the success of marketing campaigns

To track the success of your external marketing efforts, try using marketing source codes with Traffic Facts (free with Pro or Basic reseller plans).  By tying a marketing source code to each and every external advertising campaign -- whether it's a banner ad on your blog, a link trade on a partner's Web site, or a pay-per-click advertising campaign -- you can use Traffic Facts to tell you what's working and what isn't.

1. Set up Traffic Facts. If you haven't already done so, enable Traffic Facts in the Reseller Control Center under the "My Settings" menu.  You'll need to create a login, then check the box to enable Traffic Facts. If you're using your free WebSite Tonight® account or other hosting for a custom storefront, see exactly where traffic enters your site. Use the custom JavaScript to add tracking to all your custom pages.

2. Create marketing source codes. There's no limit to the number of marketing source codes you can set up, so be sure to take advantage of the opportunity to create unique identifiers for each of your marketing efforts.  You'll find the "Marketing Source Code" set-up under "Marketing Tools" in the RCC. 

For example, let's say you have a trade with Widgets.com where they agree to run three banners for you on different pages of their site. You'll want to know exactly which pages generate hits back to your site, so you'll need to create a different Marketing Source Code for each banner.  You might set up your codes something like this:

Advertising Vendor: Widgets.com

Advertising Campaign: 2008 Banner Series 1

Advertising Codes: WIDGET01, WIDGET02, WIDGET03

Description: Email Banner offer from Widgets.com home page

3. Include Marketing Source Codes in Links. To identify incoming traffic using marketing source codes you'll need to embed the code in the links that come back to your storefront.  You can either direct traffic back to your home page, or better yet, send customers to a specific landing page that repeats your offer or describes product details.  Embed the code by adding isc=WIDGET01 to the variable string on your link - the ‘?' after the page name indicates the start of the variable string, and multiple variables are separated with an ‘&'.  Your link might look like:

http://www.myresellerstore.com?isc=WIDGET01
 or
https://www.securepaynet.net/gdshop/email.asp?prog_id=YourStore&isc=WIDGET01

4. Check your Results.  Once your links are out in the world and live for a few days, you'll want to see if you're getting any results.  You now have two sources of incoming data - you can check the Marketing Source Codes Report in the RCC under "My Reports" for a quick update on how many hits, customers, and orders your marketing campaign has bought in.

Once you have that snapshot - it's time to use Traffic Facts to learn more about ad performance.  Launch your Traffic Facts account from the RCC and use it to check on the following:

Which referring sites are performing the best?  If you're running multiple campaigns that enter your site on the same landing page, you'll want to know who's driving the most traffic.  You can use the Referring Domains report to measure this activity, identifying the campaign by checking the marketing source code embedded in the link.

If your advertising campaign spans several pages on one site, as in our example with Widgets.com, you can use the Referring URLs report to drill down and see which pages in particular are bringing in the most traffic.  This can help you evaluate whether a particular site or page within a partner site is a good fit for you.  Before deciding to cancel an agreement, think about tweaking or overhauling your ad or link text to appeal to that site's audience.

Are you using the right landing page?  If your Marketing Source Code report is showing a good number of hits but no conversions, consider whether you're driving your traffic to the right page of your site.  You can use the Entry Page report to evaluate how often specific pages on your site are the first page incoming visitors see.  Use this information to gauge traffic generated by your advertising efforts - this is particularly telling if you are using an internal page to your site as a landing page or if you've created a custom landing page using WebSite Tonight or a custom-hosted solution.  When your campaign is running, a marked increase in landing page traffic indicates your campaign is effective.

Once you've identified the entry pages to your site, you can use the Visitor Path report to learn more about your visitors' experience on your site.  After they've entered your site on the correct page, does it keep their interest and result in a sale?  Or do they lose focus and wander to other pages and eventually away from your site?  If they do purchase, are they purchasing the product you originally advertised? You can figure this out by seeing which page(s) lead to the cart, and by checking the sales volume via your Product Sales report in the RCC.  If the answer is consistently no, that's an indicator you should consider changing your offer/landing page and cater to what shoppers are looking for.

5. Tweak, measure, evaluate - Now that you have a snapshot of your visitors' behavior, use that information to tweak your campaigns and test variations of your advertising.  The more you work to understand your customers and their actions, the more you'll sell!