I'm Frustrated Why Are People Not Searching For Our Product

[kfegarty]

Not sure what category - so I posted here and in the Email Marketing forum.

We developed an ad tracking system http://www.eztrackz.com to allow us to monitor the success of our email marketing, PPC links etc. How many people opened our messages, clicked on our ads, which ads resulted in sales… We have now started to promote this product to others. My frustration is that very few people seem to be interested in tracking their online ads. Overture shows that only 433 people searched for the keyword “ad tracking” and fewer still for related searches. Although we are at the top of search engines like Google, we get very little traffic.

Do marketers want to track their online advertising or do they just hope it works? Are we too early in the curve, people just haven’t thought about tracking yet, or is it that this is a product that is not necessary? I would love some feedback….. do you track your online ads, do you feel it necessary, and does a product like this make sense for the online market space?

<EDIT: I merged both threads and left the topic in this forum, as it concerns all online advertising, not just Email Marketing - Brittany>

[sudhani]

Though I am not an expert in this field, my common sense tells me that the company providing E-Mail marketing solution should also provide all the ad-tracking services you are offering!!! If I am going for an E-Mail marketing campaign, I will ensure that my marketer gives me a way to find out the effectiveness of the campaign.

I am afraid you should re-look into your business model or reposition the product to target email marketing companies. You might consider promoting your brand name with their clients like Intel does (Intel Inside) - but I am not sure whether it is worth the effort required.

Happy Ad-Tracking!!!

[kfegarty]

Thanks, I will look at the Intel type of option. I guess to we want to promote our product not just for email marketing, but for any online tracking. Perhaps behind banner ads, ezine ads, checking against PPC click results etc.

You are most likely correct on the email marketing service side.

Cheers,

[kjohnson5576]

A couple key points to make on your site: How does it work and can it handle multiple campaigns? These need to be up front and center, along with testimonials if you have any.

I don't know why people aren't looking. I'm Interested and will probably sign up for the free trial today, although your prices for smaller users appear to be disproportional to large users. Thanks for the info.

[dmorrow]

Hi Karen,

I'm new to online marketing, but it seems to me that the problem might possibly be that ad tracking software is already included free in many affiliate programs.

I have it included in my members area in Megaopp, Referalware, ISOregister, and other opps. Ad tracking is also included in the 2 safelists that I joined. The Free Click Thru Club also has links for us to get ad tracking software.

This could be why so few people are searching for ad tracking software exclusively. Yes, the need is there, but it has been addressed by so many others.

I hope this helps, Karen.
Donna Morrow

[citypublife]

Karen

I agree with you, stats should be tracked, but much in line with other posts, my existing mailing client, Constant Contact, give me all the stats I need to assess campaigns. My PPC, Google, do the same and my server logs give me other stats.

What is it you offer that is different? I would be interested if it offered what why I don't have already. Good luck.

http://www.citypublife.co.uk

[Steven Glover]

This is an interesting topic. HotelKingdom.com has a pretty high daily budget when it comes to our PPC advertsiements and the programs we are involved in provide tracking to an extent. We monitor the rest using web trends

[Bizwala]

We created a similar tracking system that serves multiple purposes. The system tracks specific points of a users visit to the site as well as some points of interaction. We are generally interested in entry and exit points (which can be deteremined through regular stat software) as well as Conversion and ROI (major benefit of tracking). In addition we look at other aspects of the user's interaction with the site, for internal site marketing decisions.

We track email marketing as well for clients. Once we train the client on the software and explain the benefits to them as well as us (their marketing company) they are more comfortable with online marketing and in turn creates a better way for us and our client to determine changes as needed.

I'm a true believer of tracking for any marketing on the www. The benfits to both the client and us are of great value in dertiming any and all aspects of their online business.

[tceperry]

I do my own online marketing. Why pay for a firm if you can devote the time and effort yourself? I use the available tracking on my PPC's and my host ISP offers stats via Webtrends. I check these and tweak almost daily! I would almost never be interested in paying for additional services because I already have the tools at my disposal (at no additional charge!). I'm not certain, however, if the rest of the self-represented community out there has this available, nor do I think they realize they need it. Since it appears to me that you need to educate in order to develop your customer base, you may need to invest in blogs, affiliates, or other off-line advertising. Could be great for you if you beat the competition to the classroom!

[Bizwala]

In many ways, web trends can be a solution for some advertisers. But smart tracking is important when it comes down to dollars and not numbers.

Our clients are trained to denote the value of a keyword based on it's conversion rather than how often people visit the site using the keyword.

As in most marketing cases, if you cannot determine your Return on Investment, then who are you trusting with your Investments?

Kaleina

[margec]

>Our clients are trained to denote the value of a keyword based on it's conversion rather than how often people visit the site using the keyword.

Exactly! I can track where all the visitors come from very easily. But it's finding out where the actual BUYERS come from that's the key. I need to know where someone who uses the shopping cart came from...not every visitor (since a lot of folks use our site for information.)

[Bizwala]

That is exactly what our software does Marge. So in regards to the original subject of this thread. I am in full support of user tracking for all online businesses.

Email Marketing tracking is great, you can determine the effectiveness of your design and products based on current customer load. But internal site user tracking far exceeds it as you get a greater understanding and knowledge of where your customer is geographically located, why and how they came to your site and what they were looking for. If they purchased something, you can instantly define their interaction with your website and products prior to purchase.

All these points are important in creating additional new customers as well as customer retention.

Kaleina
bc@bizwala.com

[tsindos]

My frustration is that very few people seem to be interested in tracking their online ads.

Isn't this the same as me saying that I am frustrated that nobody is looking to rent a car in the middle of the winter?
All sites will begin to receive queries when the Internet public out there will need the service. In my opinion, very few people need the service for mainly 2 reasons:
1. Most e-mail sites have an online tracking system
2. Most USERS do not know it can be done (I am not talking about people spending half their lives in front of a PC monitor).
Personally, I only found out a year ago that it was possible to see who opened the e-mail I sent. I am still trying to find an easy to use software to use with my system (I do not use an online e-mailer).

PS. Trying to open http://www.eztrackz.com returns "Cannot find server". Maybe this is something you should look into as well.

[thusmann]

PS. Trying to open http://www.eztrackz.com returns "Cannot find server". Maybe this is something you should look into as well.

I too experience this problem. I can visit your mailworkz.com site, but the eztracks is a "page not found". When I queried the whois database, I couldn't get any info, request timed out, so it is likely that your DNS server is not very dependable. Either way, it is critical that you get to the bottom of this.

[Bizwala]

I am still trying to find an easy to use software to use with my system (I do not use an online e-mailer).

If you are sending email through desktop software, and you are promoting an online website and/or products located on a website. It's all trackable.

[tceperry]

Bizwala "As in most marketing cases, if you cannot determine your Return on Investment, then who are you trusting with your Investments?"

We are NOT an online business, so we have the ability to use a truly unique method, we ask each and every caller EXACTLY how they found us. We have the PPC, the hits/visits from Webtrends, and the new customer information first-hand. So, I guess I trust myself with my investments. Since, over the past 3 months, a grand total of $1500 in PPC's has translated to a real $45,000 in new customers (40% repeat), I guess we are doing sonething right.

[panyd]

We have an URL but we mainly in dealers,so we try to send some mailto customers,but it have not good effection.So we don't know the effection of mail marketing[/url]http://www.dhsart.com.[/img]

[dwilliams]

We do all our own tracking using a combination of admintools either provided by whatever service we are using (Google, Overture, etc.) and/or those provided by our web services vendor. Typically it is a combination of. Tracking CPC, banners, reciprocal links, etc is a fairly simple matter. You just tack your tracking code on to the end of your url, make sure your web site is set up to record the click throughs and off you go. It can be time consuming and needs to be constantly monitored, but it is not difficult. I'm not sure there is great value in software that does this for you, unless you are in a situation where you are the sole member of your web "team" and just don't have the time to devote that this requires.

[Mili]

Hi:

Just a thought. Now that you know why individuals are less likely to buy your product, then consider selling this product to the crowd that provides the individual with nifty tools --- the e-mail sites and the ones who offer PPC. Aim for the ones who don't have a tracking system.

The smaller market then would be the individuals, and they shouldn't be ruled out, as there is proof that you have gotten sales from them.

- Mili -

[kfegarty]

Hi - Thanks for all your comments.

One - comment on adding "how does it work" and can it handle multiple campaigns. We will be adding these answers to our site.

Yes - I do agree that many PPC services have their own tracking, however we still use our system to get a "second opinion" In fact, we found that Overture and another PPC search engine had billed us for over 4500 clicks and that by looking at the details of the clicks on our system we saw that they were generated by an IP in Australia with a mechanized system every 7 seconds. The other PPC had the same hits on it. Overture was very quick to respond to our emails and quickly refunded the money. The other PPC took longer and we had to show them a copy of the logs. So we definitely found that it was of value to use another system and check the details rather than just looking at Overture's results.

Also a couple of people mentioned trouble getting to our site. We had a catastrophic Hurricane that has downed all of our power, telephones, data systems etc. All backup power systems and secondary data channels and data locations were also affected.

Systems are back on-line now so we encourage you to try again.

Cheers,

Karen

[chris_g]

kfegarty wrote:
“Do marketers want to track their online advertising or do they just hope it works? Are we too early in the curve, people just haven’t thought about tracking yet, or is it that this is a product that is not necessary?”

We starting offering a similar tool about 18 months ago http://www.keywordtool.net that was not yet readily available at the time. Ours was designed for SEO and we realized the same problems as you are seeing kfegarty. I find the information provided by the people here interesting to read. We were puzzled by the lack of interest in our tool since the value of the service seemed so obvious to us.

Margec wrote:

“Exactly! I can track where all the visitors come from very easily. But it's finding out where the actual BUYERS come from that's the key. I need to know where someone who uses the shopping cart came from...not every visitor (since a lot of folks use our site for information.)”

This is key information required to make decisions and I think it should be easily available. For example Keywordtool will record the search engine, keyword used then determines if they actually completed the sale. You then know which search engine and which keyword generated the sale by reviewing an easy to read report. Knowing how many visitors or even what keyword they used on a particular search engine doesn’t help much unless you know if they actually bought what they came for.

Here is how we view this:

Most people in this business know that usually a small percentage of all the keywords in a campaign are responsible for most of the sales or leads generated. (80-20 rule). 80% of the sales are generated by 20% of the coming to your website. It's not exactly 80% but is usually 50-80 based on conversion rates.

We showed our services to experts and they immediately saw the benefits and advantages of using it. For example if any advertiser is spending $1000 a month on PayPerClick (PPC) and reduced their spending by 50% and didn't see and significant decrease in sales they would save themselves $500/month. This is not unreasonable, some see higher savings. What if you were spending $2000, $3000 a month or more. It's easy to see the ability to either save on advertising or direct your spending towards the most effective advertising to realize the largest profits. You don’t need to even be spending a lot of money to realize a benefit from some type of accurate tracking.

This is where you can be making decisions based on facts rather than speculations or gut feelings become extremely important. It's a more scientific approach. It’s not too say that all advertisers need more tracking tools but there are certainly a larger number of people that need more accurate tracking than care to admit.

The question is, could it be done better with something like EzTracksZ or KeywordTool? Well that depends, in some cases it can mean a significant increase in efficiency.

[RochelleFe]

I think that being able to track responses is great..but not when it's costing you money and taking away from advertising dollars.

In other words..I would prefer to not know what the response is and throw those dollars I'm saving into more advertising and just hope for the best.

But on the other hand, when you can track, you can see what is effective and what is not which may be beneficial to your company in the long run by saving wasted advertising dollars