Quantifying Online Promotion Efforts?

udhay asks: "Hi -- I'm with a startup that has what we think is a hot new product (it's a downloadable desktop app). We got some venture funding in, and are looking to outsource some of the stuff that we need to do, such as online promotion. "Online Promotion Agencies" are a dime a dozen however, and we were wondering how one would go about rating them, and how one would quantify the results they produce. I figured /. is a good place to ask - any ideas?"

Comments

Quick free tip!

[Ratface]

Banner advertising, love it or hate it, is one way of getting people to link to your site and discover your product.

Banner advertisers offer all sorts of mechanisms for showing you how many click-thoughs you have had etc. How can you tell though if they are telling the truth? One way of checking is to use a different URL to your site from each advertising site.

Use a URL like this http://cookstour.org?slashdot

The ? marks the beginning of a query string and should not cause any problems in your pages unless you have a dynamic first page, expecting query string arguments. (In this case build your own tracker!)

So what does this do? Well those different querystring srguments will show up as different entry pages in your log files, allowing you to tally the agency's click-through figures against your own.

You can of course also use this technique for any time you place a link to your own pages and want to know where it came from.

Hope this little tip helps.