John Hasson

Somehow my wife talked me into going with her and my 3 daughters to the mall for clothing shopping. *hint* If your wife suggests you go to the mall with her and the girls for some shopping… so NO. (but do it nicely).

Needless to say I was bored out of my mind. Malls these days don’t have much appeal for me. At all.

But.. I did see something interesting. There was a person at one of those kiosk booths in the center of the mall using facebook. I was shocked to meet an actual facebook user. (Someone who really is into it.. not someone who just uses for ads and a little bit of networking). So I asked him a few questions about how he used it and what he thought of the ads on the left hand side. Turns out he clicks on the ads from time to time but hasn’t ever bought anything off them. This led to him telling me that he actually has been working on making facebook ads for their product. He was limiting it to just two state (Utah and Idaho). I told him that since the product was geared more towards religious people to not limit it just to those two states, but use religions as targets (Mormon, LDS, Christian, Protestant, Catholic, etc..) and leave it for worldwide or national. Then I asked him if he was able to track a sale from an ad. I wasn’t sure if he got what I meant at first so I explained about creating a bunch of different ads on facebook and tracking each one to know if it resulted in a sale…

If you are not able to track a click on an ad to a sale (or action/goal) then you are really just throwing your money away. Sure at first you need to throw a bunch of different ads and keyword /landing page /domain combinations. But after you have some data and conversions you need to revisit the campaign and optimize it. You can NOT do this without some sort of tracking. (And yeah I know google, yahoo and MSN all have tracking features.. but for some reason they never seem to catch 100% of the conversions. It is kinda annoying which is why I have a supplemental tracking system)

Send each keyword to a landing page with a separate tag. mypage?k=1000 or mypage?k=keyword (I recommend against using the keyword instead of a number in your tracking) and then carry that identifier out to the conversion. This way you know which ad/keyword combination resulted in a sale without relying just on your PPC provider to have accurate tracking (they are really good, but not 100%). Plus with this method you can track for PPC providers that don’t even have tracking (facebook and others).

Tags: Advice, PPC, Pay Per Click // Add Comment »