Thus, the visitors you receive as a result of advertising are more likely to convert into buyers on your site.

However, not every advertising campaign you run can prove cost-effective. For instance, let's imagine that your site sells office furniture. So you set up a PPC account at Overture and pay around .50 per click on your ad for "executive office desk" and "office computer desk". As a result, when someone searches for either of these keywords on Overture, they are shown your ad and a link to your site.

Both keywords generate certain amount of traffic to your site when the Overture searchers click on your ads. So your average expense on these campaigns is about $200 each.

But in reality, the searchers of "executive office desks" aren't as satisfied with what you have to offer as are the searchers of "office computer desks". In fact, none of those visitors that find your site on Overture when your ad is shown for "executive office desks" make a purchase. In the meantime, visitors that primarily searched for "office computer desks" buy several desks, totally covering your expense on that campaign.

The main problem is that you don't know which keywords work well for you.

HitLens helps you resolve this problem by offering a special mechanism of advertising campaign tracking. Once a visitor has entered your site, HitLens is able to detect their every action within its limits, even if a visitor exits your site and reenters several days later to make a purchase. If HitLens knows which campaign and which exact keywords have directed the visitor to your Web page, it is able to assign the visitor to this campaign and when the visitor completes a transaction, assign the corresponding revenue to that campaign also.

Thus, HitLens is an indispensable tool of measuring the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and leveraging expenses in order to get the most out of your publicity. Use it to calculate the ROI of every ad campaign, and, where applicable, for every keyword you target, to switch off the underperforming ones.

Mechanism of tracking campaigns

Theoretically, any time you give somebody a link to your Web site, it can be treated as an advertising campaign, even if you don't pay for it. Mostly, you give your links to the owners of other sites and to PPC search engines. However, you may also budget for and advertise through other media as well, such as newspapers, newsletters, and television. When you provide a link to your site it, these are advertising campaigns that can be tracked through HitLens.

The key to tracking these kinds of campaigns is in the URL address provided for visitors interested in surfing your landing page.

For HitLens to be able to track a particular visitor coming from a particular campaign - for example, "tell-friens" or "weekly-newsletter" - this URL must be built according to the following pattern:

http://www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.htm?source=tell-friends

You see that here the address of the Web page to which you want to redirect the visitors (http://www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.htm) is supplemented by the special parameter "source" which goes after the "?" sign and has the value "tell-friends".

When HitLens processes the visit, it extracts the "source" parameter from the URL requested by the visitor and treats it as the name of the campaign. So, if you ask your friend to place a banner pointing to your home page on his or her site, and want to track this campaign, you might want to link this banner to "http://www.yourhomepage.com?source=friend+banner". Thus, HitLens will know that the visitors who click on that banner come from the "friend banner" campaign.

(Note: the part of the URL which follows the optional question mark "?" is called the "query string". If you ever need a space in the query string, replace it with a plus "+").

When you open HitLens, you will be able to access all reports related to your campaigns under the "Campaigns" report group. You will also be able to configure the budget for your campaigns so that HitLens knows how much of your expense is already covered and is able to calculate the ROI (return on investment).

Remember that campaign tracking will only begin when the first visitor is referred through the campaign. Before that, the campaign remains invisible to HitLens even if it has started and the campaign link is placed on another site. Until the first visitor comes to your landing page by following the campaign link, you will not be able to set the budget and further configure this campaign.

Also, your landing page must have the valid HitLens tracking code otherwise no clicks will be counter.

Special cases

Sometimes you need to track not only campaigns themselves, but also keywords, as one campaign can deal with several keywords. For instance, we own the Web site "www.weatherscreen.com" and bid on Overture for "weather forecast software", "long-range weather forecast", and "desktop weather forecast". We will organize them into one single campaign "Overture" yet reserve the possibility to differentiate between the performance of different keywords:

http://www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.htm?source=overture&kwd=weather+forecast+software

http://www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.htm?source=overture&kwd=long-range+weather+forecast

http://www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.htm?source=overture&kwd=desktop+weather+forecast

Thus, a link "details" will appear next to our "overture" campaign in the HitLens report where we will be able to analyze keyword performance.

What you should remember

1. HitLens is a powerful tool for tracking the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. It is able to track not only campaigns but also several keywords or creatives within one campaign with the help of the "kwd" parameter.
2. The tracking requires that your campaign link contains a special "source" parameter (and, optionally, "kwd" parameter) and that your landing page contains a valid tracking code.
3. A new campaign appears in the HitLens campaign manager only after the first visitor is referred through it. After that, you are able to set the campaign budget for ROI calculation.
4. You can manage your PPC campaigns by switching off unprofitable keywords and campaigns.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment