How to Track Your Ad Spend

1. How can I get more for my online advertising spend?
   
2. What benefits should I expect if I do track my results and optimize my online advertising spend?
   
3. Currently, I track my results overall (not breaking them out by banner buys, e-mail buys, MySexMap buys, etc.). Isn't that enough?
   
4. How can I track my online advertising results?
   
5. What data will I need to collect in order to be able to calculate the Conversion Rate, ROAS and ROI?
   
6. How can I find out which clicks came from MySexMap or any other advertising vehicle?
   
7. How can I find out which sales/conversions came from MySexMap?
   
8. I use third party tracking software (such as Webtrends) and their numbers don't seem to match my server logs. Why?
   

1. How can I get more for my online advertising spend?
   Track the results of your advertising methods closely, then spend on the advertising vehicles (such as MySexMap listings, banners and e-mails) that work and stop spending on those that don't work. It sounds simple and the bottom line results can be substantial, but many people aren't sure how to track their results effectively. The remainder of this page provides a simple step-by-step guide for how to track your online advertising results.

2. What benefits should I expect if I do track my results and optimize my online advertising spend?
   A great retailer once said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." But in the online world, you CAN know which half is wasted. Tracking your online spend by advertising vehicle is the key. The benefits of tracking your advertising spend and concentrating on those advertising vehicles that work include:
   • Increasing your revenue: You can drive more sales with less ad spend.
   • Saving time: You only spend your time managing those advertising buys that work.
   • Saving money: You'll only need to spend money on the advertising that works.

3. Currently, I track my results overall (not breaking them out by banner buys, e-mail buys, MySexMap buys, etc.). Isn't that enough?
   Unfortunately, tracking the total spend level does not give you enough information. It can't tell you which types of online advertising are working and which aren't. For instance, say you spent money on six different advertising vehicles in the month of June:
   
   • Banners on four different sites
   • Listings on MySexMap
   • E-mails to a prospect list that you rented from Yesmail

   If you only look at the combined results, you won't be able to figure out which method worked best. Without this information, it will be difficult to determine whether you should spend money on the same methods again in July.

4. How can I track my online advertising results?
   There are three standard ways to measure the effectiveness of your online advertising spend:
   • Conversion Rate
   • Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)
   • Return on Investment (ROI)

   Conversion Rate measures how many visits to your site "convert" to a sale or "action."
   

   Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) tells you how much revenue you generated per dollar you spent on a given advertising vehicle.
   

   Return on Investment (ROI) tells you how much profit you generated per dollar you spent on a given advertising vehicle.
   

5. What data will I need to collect in order to be able to calculate the Conversion Rate, ROAS and ROI?
   You'll need four pieces of data:
   • Number of visits to your site from each advertising vehicle. Log the number of clicks from each advertising vehicle. When logging your clicks from MySexMap, remember that the majority of MySexMap's clicks will be coming from our partner network, so be sure to use Tracking URLs.
   • Number and value of sales from the visits from each advertising vehicle. Calculate how many of your sales came from each advertising vehicle's clicks and what the value of those sales was.
   • Profit per sale. Calculate your total profit from a sale. For example, if you sell rocking chairs for $200 each and each rocking chair costs you $125 to make (materials, labor, facilities, etc.), then you make $75 in profit on each chair.
   • Advertising spend per advertising vehicle. Figure out your total advertising spend broken out for each advertising vehicle.

6. How can I find out which clicks came from MySexMap or any other advertising vehicle?
   Your own server logs are the best place to find out where your traffic is coming from. There are two ways to get the data from your server logs.

   The first way is to review the server log reporting yourself. Open the log file in your server software. This file has an entry for each hit that has come to your site. Just count the entries where "MySexMap" (or another source) appears in the referring URL.

   The other way is to use third party tracking software (such as Urchin and Webtrends). This software sorts through your server logs and produces a report of where your traffic is coming from. But there are drawbacks to using this software because these companies only sample the traffic you receive (for example, count one IP address per 30 minutes) rather than counting all of your traffic.*

   In either case, remember that some advertising vehicles deliver traffic from more than one Web site. For example, MySexMap delivers 95% of its traffic from partners like Yahoo!, America Online, AltaVista and Lycos. So you need to make sure you use Tracking URLs so you'll know which traffic comes from MySexMap, even if it looks like it comes from one of our partners.

   Using a Tracking URL is fairly simple. Just put the following at the end of your URL: "/?source=MySexMap". For example, if your URL is www.xyz.com, then your Tracking URL would be www.xyz.com/?source=MySexsMap. ItŐs important to test each new Tracking URL in your own Web browser to verify that it is linking properly to its specified page. If you find that a Tracking URL is not linking properly, you might want to eliminate the forward slash after the domain.

   If you decide not to use a Tracking URL, it will be nearly impossible to identify all the traffic that comes from MySexMap to your site. Most of MySexMap's traffic comes through its partner network (sites like America Online, Lycos and AltaVista). Without Tracking URLs on your MySexMap account, you may not be able to identify the partner traffic as coming from your MySexMap account.

   * At time of publication.

7. How can I find out which sales/conversions came from MySexMap?
   Counting conversions on your site is greatly simplified if your site supports any method of user session tracking (using cookies, server-side scripting, etc.). If you create a user session (or set a cookie) when someone visits your site, then you can count how many user sessions contained a successful pageview signifying that a desired action has been completed (confirmation of sign-up, receipt for goods sold, etc.). You can then analyze the referral source for each of your user sessions (likely from the referral URL in your Web log entry for when the session was initiated) and count how many conversions came from each advertising vehicle. This last step is made much easier if you use Tracking URLs.

   If you're not using user sessions or cookies, you can instead analyze the IP address of each visitor. Your Web server records the IP address of each visitor to your site. However, relying on unique IP addresses is imperfect for a number of reasons. Some Internet service providers and organizations use dynamic IP addressing, where an IP address is assigned dynamically when a user logs into a host system. Others, such as America Online, pass information requests through an intermediate proxy server, causing all requests to appear to come from a small number of IP addresses (those of the proxy servers, not the users). Third party Web log analysis programs (like WebTrends) make IP tracking much easier, but cannot much improve on its reliability for tracking conversions for unique users.

8. I use third party tracking software (such as Webtrends) and their numbers don't seem to match my server logs. Why?
   There are two explanations.

   First, a discrepancy can occur if you do not have Tracking URLs on advertising vehicles that use a network of partners, as MySexMap does. For instance, MySexMap delivers 95% of its traffic through its partners such as Yahoo!, America Online, AltaVista and Lycos. If you do not have a Tracking URL at MySexMap, your Web logs will show traffic coming from America Online, AltaVista and Lycos, and you'll have no way of knowing that this traffic is actually originating from your advertising spend on MySexMap.

   Second, a discrepancy can occur from the way some third party tracking software tracks unique users. They count one IP address for every half-hour interval as a unique user.* The problem with this counting technique is that the software is not taking into consideration the existence of proxy servers, which are computers that act as agents for multiple users. The effect of proxy servers is that thousands of truly unique users can all share the same IP address. The best example of proxy server traffic is America Online. America Online routes all of its subscribers through a limited number of IP addresses, so any one America Online IP address can map back to tens of thousands of separate America Online users. Software companies sometimes fail to take the proxy server condition into account.

   * At the time of publication.