Page 286 - Duct Tape Marketing

270 Part IV: Getting the Word Out without Advertising

Evaluating Your Online Activity

On your own, you can and should keep track of the number of leads gener-
ated by your site. Additionally, Web site activity reports allow you to measure
the nature and number of visitors or visitor sessions that your Web site is
hosting, as well as the pages viewed, files downloaded, dates and times of
visits, referral sources, session length, features used, navigation path fol-
lowed, errors encountered, even the keywords entered to find your site.

Ask the business that hosts your site about the kinds of reports available,
costs involved, and ways to adjust your site to allow capture of valuable
information about your site visitors.

To evaluate the success of your traffic-building efforts, consider setting up a
redirect. This is a page where referrals will land before being redirected to the
appropriate page on your site. By creating a redirect, you can measure traffic
coming to your site from each link.

Use redirects only if people are clicking on a link to reach your site. If people
have to type in your address, forget about redirecting them because you may
lose them in the process, defeating the purpose of measurement altogether.

Advertising Online

Banner ads. AdWord ads. Click-throughs. Advertising online is expanding at a
dizzying rate. Some studies see online advertising revenues surpassing maga-
zine advertising revenues over the next few years. Whether or not the fore-
cast will hold true, advertisers are flocking to online opportunities in large
part because they can be so specifically targeted and clearly measured for
effectiveness.

Banner ads

These narrow image ads — 480 x 60 pixels or about 112⁄ inches high and 4 inches
wide — run on third-party Web sites. When viewers click on the banner (called
a click-through), they go directly to the advertiser’s site. Interest in banner ads
waned largely due to consumer resistance, but a Google program allowing
banner ads on sites that participate in the Google AdSense program was
announced in mid-2004, inspiring new interest in the format.