John Wanamaker was the owner of a department store and the first retailer to ever run a full-page newspaper ad in 1879. But before long he realized something, and uttered the now famous line …

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I just don't know which half."

And ever since then, smart marketers and small business owners have been tracking their advertising in order to optimize their marketing, grow faster, and make a whole bunch more money.

And while a lot has changed since then, one thing hasn't ...

The fact is that tracking is critical to your success as a direct response marketer, online or off.

In fact, as a small business owner it's even more important because you don't have a lot of money to waste, right?

So whether you're selling your own products and services, you're an affiliate marketer, you're a coach or a consultant, you’re promoting a business opportunity or anything else - unless you have a "marketing department" to do it for you, this is just something you need to get good at.

In fact, let's get one thing straight right now ...

When it comes to online marketing, unless your product or service goes “viral,” you have almost no chance at all if you don't properly track and optimize your paid ads and other online promotions.

It may not sound terribly sexy on the surface, I'll give you that ...

But I've been marketing online for over 25 years now, and I can tell you that tracking is truly one of the only real "secrets" to making a ton of money online.

And I guarantee that the time you spend now learning this “stuff” will give you a better return on your time than just about anything else you could ever possibly do for your business.

You can literally double your business with just the basics.

The 80/20 rule is in effect here, and the majority of your results will come from tracking and optimizing just a few things.

Here’s all you really need to know for now:

To optimize your marketing, and your entire online business, you'll want to track all the money coming in and all the money going out - down to the penny.

And aside from any hard product costs and fixed expenses, most of the money you'll spend in your business will probably go towards advertising and buying traffic to your website, so that's really what we're talking about here.

It's simple, and there are really only three parts to it. Here's all you need to do:
 
So let's talk about how to do this in your business ...

One of the most important metrics you'll want to pay attention to is Return On Investment or ROI.

This is a great metric - especially as a "newbie" to tracking and optimization - because it takes just about everything into account and gives you just one thing to look at, so you don’t get overwhelmed.

And ROI is just what it sounds like. It's the amount of money you make compared to the amount of money you spent to make it, expressed as a percentage.

So if your ROI, either overall in your business or for any specific ad or marketing campaign, is positive that means you're making money, and if it's negative that means you're losing money.

Since the goal is a positive ROI, and one that's ideally as high as possible, let's work backward and try to figure out the best way to achieve that ...

To increase your ROI you need to either increase your revenues or reduce expenses.

And tracking is the key to both of these things.

Like John Wanamaker, after personally talking to and working with over 1,000 online marketers over the past twenty-five years, I can say there's a pretty good chance that you're wasting about half the money you spend buying traffic.

And proper tracking is the only way to identify and eliminate this waste.

But that's just the start because proper tracking also allows you to easily optimize and scale your “winners.”

Let's just keep working backward…

How can you increase your online revenues from the website traffic you’re already getting?

The easiest way is to increase your Sales Conversion Rate, which is the number of buyers divided by visitors.

So if you average five new customers out of every 100 visitors, that'd be 0.05 or 5%.

Let's keep working backward...

What else happens before someone becomes a customer?

The exact specifics depend on your individual business, but they may have opted-in to your email list, signed up for a webinar or downloaded a whitepaper, submitted a request for a quote, or any number of other things.

For the sake of discussion, let's just call all of these desirable things "Actions."

And then of course before that, they probably clicked on an ad somewhere or responded to some other type of call to action, which is where it all begins.

So these are all the basic but super critical things you need to be paying attention to.

Let's go ahead and make a list of the things you need to track …
 
If you track and pay attention to just these three things, you'll be well on your way.

Now that you have your list, let's start at the beginning and talk about each one ...

It all begins with the click, and you should strive to know where each and every click comes from, and how much each and every click costs you.

Whether it's an ad on Google or Facebook, an ad you're running on a blog in your niche, a "guest post" or other pieces of content you've published somewhere, email traffic you're buying or anything else, you need to track it.

You can do this a few different ways with ClickMagick, but generally speaking, you'll want to use a unique “tracking link” for all of your different ads and traffic sources.

This way you can easily track them all separately, which is the crucial first step.

The next thing you'll want to track if it applies to your business, are any desirable "actions" that users take as they progress through your marketing funnel.

This could include - but obviously isn't limited to - opting into your email list, registering for a webinar, filling out a form to request more info or schedule a call, simply clicking on other "key" links on your website, or whatever else it may be.

Just think of the most important things that you want people to do as they move through your funnel, and make sure they're on your list of things to track.

For a lot of people, this is simply going to be tracking their opt-ins, and that's fine.

And lastly, there are your sales. You'll definitely need to track those. But that's it.

That's all you need to track and optimize to literally double your online revenues faster than you'd think possible.

This is Patrick, the founder of ClickMagick, and I hope that gives you a good place to start.

You’ll learn a ton more as you start to use ClickMagick, you go through a few of the step-by-step tutorials in our Knowledge Base, and you interact with our amazing support team of real marketers …

And we’ll be here to help every step of the way.

Article 688 Last updated: 02/10/2024 3:03:56 PM
https://www.clickmagick.com/kb/?article=688