I have a new client who is spending $500 a month on an advertisement in a daily newsletter.  The ad basically just has the company’s logo, name, tagline, and contact information.

Clicking the ad goes to the company’s home page.

Maybe you’re thinking, “So what? Isn’t that where they should go?”  Well… no, actually.  And here’s why:

1. You can’t track the source of the traffic. In the case of a newsletter, the visitor is clicking on a link in an email.  When this happens your web site has no way of knowing exactly where that click came from.  The visitor might just as well have typed the company’s web site address right into their browser.  This is called “direct traffic” as opposed to “referred traffic.”  What you want is referred traffic. I’ll cover the reasons why in another post, but for now just assume it’s true .
2. You can’t measure results. Without knowing WHICH visitor took WHAT action, you have no way of knowing whether that click source is working or not.  If you have several Internet channels you are using to drive traffic to your site, if you send them all to the same place, all you’re doing is driving traffic, not results.  When someone takes action on your site — clicks a button, signs up for your mailing list, buys something, requests a quote — you are getting results.  If don’t know where that visitor came from, you can’t identify the specific channels that brought you the visitors who took action.  (Ever heard the saying, “I know I’m wasting half of my marketing dollars, I just don’t know which half”?)
3. You can’t get specific. Since everyone’s going to the home page, what you end up with is just one big pool of visitors.  They came to your site because they were looking for something.  Your home page doesn’t have enough detail for your visitors to see clearly whether you have what they were looking for.  People are busy.  If you don’t give them what they need quickly, they will go elsewhere.
4. You can’t do any split testing. By giving everyone the same message over and over, you have no way of knowing whether your content can be improved.  Split testing is a way of randomly displaying slightly different variations of the same content and then measuring which one gets better results.  Then you take the variation that “wins” and create another slightly different (hopefully better) variation and test those together.  This is a way to continually improve your content, and therefore your results.  Home page content does not lend itself well to this type of testing.
5. You can’t segment the visitors. If you offer a variety of products and services for different types of buyers, your different marketing channels will pull different kinds of buyers to your site.  Since you know which buyers come from which source, you can essentially give them different information based on what you think they are looking for.  If you send everyone to the home page, you are not able to provide that visitor with a clear value statement that will compel them to act.

Back to my client… when they hired me, the first thing I did was put Google Analytics on their web site and add a landing page.  Then I had their office manager contact the newsletter owner with a request to change the advertisement’s link to the new landing page.

For now the landing page is just a copy of the home page (we’re doing a redesign anyway) but at the very least we can start measuring how many people are clicking on their ad.  That’s a first step.

As it turns out it’s about 30% of their existing traffic.  That’s good to know.  But it’s only about 3 or 4 clicks a day.  That’s also good to know.  We can probably improve that by changing the ad, and we can also work on a better landing page as part of the redesign.

The tools are out there, you just need to know how to use them.

This week I was interviewed for a Blog Talk Radio show called “Business Strategies That Work!” hosted by Dale Little.  Dale is an amazing host and I was honored to be her guest.

We spent an hour talking about how I’ve used both pay-for and free eBooks, as well as free monthly webinars, to add value to the lives of my small business customers, build credibility about my internet marketing expertise, and drive sales to my business and traffic to my web site.

Listen to the complete show on Dale’s Blog Talk Radio site.

Enjoy!