You have a site thats just returning on investment; nothing more or perhaps
a lot less. You believe in professional services as theyre the experts. You
have little data in their field, nor the instant and resources for
private research or independent consult.

Perhaps its Internet promotion and branding this time round and your
parting with $1000s a month for ho hum returns on your Web page investment.

BANNERS BABY!! Your net selling agent says over and over... "We are
going to expand the banner campaign." When this advice hits your desk,
another $500 a month gets released to the professional coffers.

Next week, how are those sales stats going?

Some Internet promotion professional might be fleecing you $1000s a month
in worthless banner selling . Fortunately for you, this expenditure
imbalance is exposed with the help of a writing log on your Web sites
server, raw website statistics. GOLD BABY!!

I recently submitted a proposal to a new client for, you guessed it, web page
promotion and selling . The first request to the client was for their
web site stat logs, secondly their tentative figures on banner and other
forms of branding on the Internet.

Web site stat logs are black gold. Each hit to your website is recorded
by the Web server in a writing file. Much acquired skill about those individual
hits is recorded too; among that array are all your hit Referrers. A referrer
is the site page from which a hyperlink was used to land on one of your Web page pages.

For my new client, I found a big, fat gold nugget worth $4477.05 in these
web stats. The clients banner campaign was restricted to one page , one domain,
one referrer. There was no evidence of an acceptable conversion to sales
by visitors from this site. Unique visits from these banners also generated .004%
of total traffic.

This client released equal funds to that of banners for a major search engine
campaign. Without tallying up all the miscellaneous referrals from 3rd party sites
that used the identical search engine and ads, 57% of total unique visitors was
being referred by the major search engine.

The search engine campaign bought in 150 visitors for every 1 from banners.
Please keep in mind here that banner visitors we are also not notable sales converts
either. The cash spent on banners in this case is nothing more than gold leaf
dunny paper.

The "Sponsored Links" you see next to your favourite search engines results
are usually priced by the key terms used for your search. A successful bid on
the ads account for those terms determines the cost of a click through to the
ads destination page . After a quick enquiry using one such advertisement account, I found a
low bidding term which related to the clients needs and delivered 30% more
visitors. All this for the princely sum of $22.95.

In other words, the client could have the $4500.00 banner visits delivered for
$22.95. For how years has this banner campaign been going?

Scenarios such as this indicate one of 2 things; your grasping fleeced or gross
negligence on your trusted professionals behalf. Black gold is not Texas Tea
these days. Its also not newspaper classified ink. Black gold is currently your
Web site statistics logs.

Always ask your prospective branding agency or promotion agent whether they
may back up campaign decisions with statistics. Assign someone within your company
the task of analysing page statistics against advertisement methods. If there is nobody
suitable, then you could save $1000s by paying for an independent 3rd party
assessment of your Web page statistics logs.