How to make your online advertising more effective

http://www.techradar.com/business-centre?advert test

use

http://is.gd/TRBC2

However this is still probably asking too much of a poor consumer, it's also open to mistakes eg if you put in http://is.gd/trbc2 instead of http://is.gd/TRBC2 it won't take you to the right address. But there's a way around this and that's to use Quick Response (QR) codes.

Setting up a Quick Response code

A QR code is a 2 dimensional bar code that can contain all sorts of information including a web address, it can also – providing a user has an application downloaded - be read by mobile phones. By putting a QR code on an advert it solves the problem of long web addresses. All your potential customer needs to do is point their mobile camera at the advert and they are then taken directly to your website and you can track exactly which advert they were viewing at the time.

Creating QR codes takes just a few seconds and there are hundreds of websites available that create QR codes in seconds do a Google search for "create QR codes" or try QRstuff or GoQR

Quality not quantity

One last thing to consider is what represents a good result for your advertising. Getting more data on your advertising is useful, as long as it is interpreted correctly. For example, if ten people click on advert A and thirty click on advert B, then you'd think that B was three times more effective than A? However, if advert A was only viewed 10 times, and B was viewed 2000 times then the answer is, no.

Calculating the click-through rate (CTR) allows you to get a better handle on the effectiveness of your adverts. Put simply, CTR is the ratio of views of an advert with the number of times it's clicked. So taking the figures from the previous example if you have 10 clicks from 10 views then the click-through rate is 100%, if you have 30 clicks from 2000 views the CTR is 1.5%. In general the ratio is going to be substantially lower than 100% or even 1.5%, you'll be very lucky if you get 0.1%.

CTRs are an indicator of success and you shouldn't be a slave to the numbers. To get reasonably accurate results you should be looking at 1000's of views, and you should also not dismiss an advert just because it has an average low score. It's worth also looking at how the adverts perform at different times of the day, and on different audiences. If your advert works really well at converting men in their lunch hour then keep on using it but only at those times and to that part of the audience.