Yesterday I touched on how you can measure marketing effectiveness using Google Voice.  Today, we’ll review how you can measure the effectiveness of email marketing as well as banner advertisements.

If you are purchasing email marketing services (eblasts) or banner ads with multiple companies, it is important to know how much traffic and sales are being produced through each individual advertisement.  Below are tools that you can use to track effectiveness and ensure that you are not wasting money with companies that are not giving you a good ROI (return on investment).  The tools below work best if your desired action is to have potential clients click a link or ad.

  1. Google Analytics– Yes, I’m plugging Google again!  What can I say, they have awesome free stuff.  Google Analytics is a free website tool that enables you to track tons of important data about who, what, when, where and how people are viewing your website- you know, the stuff marketers drool over.  One of the things you can view through Google Analytics is your referrers, or websites that sent traffic to you.  Perfect for tracking those banner ads!
  2. Linktrack– this service offers both free and paid plans.  Are you posting the same banner advertisement on multiple websites or sending the same eblast out through several companies?  This service allows you to plug in a web address to receive a tracking link.  You can plug in the same web address multiple times to receive different tracking links.  Give each company a different link.  This will not allow you to track views, but it will enable you to track the number of times your link or ad was clicked on.  This way, you can determine how many clicks each company/vendor/partner is sending your way.
  3. 1ShoppingCart (Marketer’s Choice)-  I am an affiliate of 1 Shopping Cart because I use it myself!  This tool is great for not only tracking clicks, but tracking actual sales.  By giving each company a different link, you can track click-throughs as well as sales made through the site.  This directly demonstrates the ROI of your marketing and advertising dollars with each company separately, allowing you to make smart decisions about future advertising