Spotting Bad Traffic Exchanges Part 7: Where are the Results?
This is it, this is the finale! The saving the best for last. The results. That’s where it’s all at. If you don’t get results, who cares about traffic? Why advertise if you don’t get anything out of it? What’s the point?
What’s your Goal
This can be different depending on what you are going for. Things like branding yourself, gaining subscribers, getting clicks, or even making that counter go up (not recommended, but I know it’s the goal for some). Once you have your goal in mind, you can detirmine how to track it.
Results with Branding
This is the hardest area to track. You don’t have any way of popping into someone’s head, and figuring out if the branding worked. So for branding sake, you’re tracking will be on gross hits. You want as many hits as you can all the time. When you are going for branding, it’s not so much about immediate results but more about being recognizable.
Results with Subscribers
Tracking the results for subscribers can be a bit tricky. The easiest way I’ve found is to use the TEtoolbox splash pages, which has built in tracking. It will see form submissions as goals automatically. The down side is it won’t track only confirmed subscribers. If you were to do this you’d need something more like HitsConnect and you’d need to setup a thank you page with the conversion tracking image on it. Then you’d need your Aweber (or other autoresponder) to send them to this page once they activate.
Results with Getting Clicks
Sometimes you might want to focus on getting clicks rather than going all the way to a sale. Most likely you’d choose this route if there is a sales page that needs to be viewed before joining. Here your goal is to grab the interest enough to get the sales page open in a new window. Then it’s the job of that page to do the rest. Here tracking is dreadfully easy with TEtoolbox’s splash pages.
Now the Tough Part
Once you have your goal in mind, and a method of tracking, the tough part can be following the results. This can be difficult if you like or dislike an exchange due to a certain feature or look, but the results overwhelmingly are telling you to start using it or stop using it.
For instance here I can see Traffic Dodgems sent me 2005 hits, 0 subscribers, and 2 clicks. Whereas StartXchange and Traffic Roundup got more clicks and more subscribers. I know that my page isn’t doing well there, so I shouldn’t spend all day surfing there. Now that doesn’t mean stop using it altogether forever, because I might make a new page that does great on there. But until I get some stats to indicate it, I’ll focus my efforts on other exchanges.
Sharing Results - A Word Of Caution
Now before you stop using Traffic Dodgems because of my results there.. Those are for my pages - not yours! Sharing results with others and using lists like Traffic Exchange List, Traffic Hoopla, or Affiliate Funnel can be fun and can help you find the exchanges that are doing good, but in the end it’s your results that matter.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Thank you for defining the term “results.” We throw that word around a lot, but it means different things to different people. And we often forget that not everyone has the same goal for their advertising efforts.
PS I absolutely LOVE the new look of the blog! You are simply amazing, Tim!
June 5th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Thanks Eva!
June 5th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Hooray Hooray again.
More great analysis by Mr Tim.
Thanks
June 5th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Yes results are individual as stated, I only recommend what works for me without giving up stats. That way others can try it themselves not knowing my numbers and develop their own. I love the internet!
June 5th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Thanks Tim,
another interesting post.
For me Branding works fine. The results from having solid and great contact with many of my referrals delivered me a lot extra!
June 5th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Make % or points …
And more great analysis …
June 6th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Wow Tim …
Congrats for a NEW LOOK !
June 12th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
I recently needed to get a (number) banner graphic as I wanted to build a page with multiple banners on. But the Standard banners are too big. So I grab the banner graphic and use Serif Photo plus to reduce to the size required. Most exchanges give you the address of the banner graphic so its easy to get. However some use some script that the users copy to display the banners.
I worked out which bit of the script would produce a banner url when entered on a browser address field.
To my shock and horror I found that the banner being displayed was not a banner for the TE but for some other affiliate program! Refreshing the window showed another different banner!
The admin or owner was using my banner credits to display his/her banners. Effectively stealing my hard work for those credits.
If your traffic exchange wraps the banner in script check that you will be displaying the banner you thought you would.
I checked several TE’s with the script banner and more than one was doing the above! Though it may be the same person that owns several TE’s.
So fellow surfers beware!
June 16th, 2008 at 8:09 am
So, can anybody say, How can we control if TE show our sites (banner,text ad) at all or not..
Are You sure that TE scripts are innocent in this ??
June 17th, 2008 at 7:08 am
I have created a PDF doc tat goes through what happens, so that you can try it on your own TE’s that use script.
Just click on the link above. Unzip the pdf and you will see what happened yesterday 16 June 2008 when I created the document.
To Tim I don’t know what can be done about this. All I know is that TE’s will get a bad name if it continues.