Becoming Our Own Clients - Using AdSymetrix to Gauge Advertising Effectiveness

AdSymetrix, the company, has just launched. Our goal is to help advertisers make smarter advertising decisions by providing them (you hopefully) with the information they need to know what works and what doesn't when it comes to their marketing.

When it comes to marketing our business, we're using the same tools we're offering you to determine what works best and what wastes our time. For AdSymetrix, we're looking at a few new ways to get interest into our business and we're tracking each of them.

First, we're looking at some of the pay - per - posting website networks. These networks provide a payment based on whether someone writes a post about your topic. We put a small amount of money in an escrow-like account and give some information about our service. When someone decides that they want to write about us, they grab the necessary information, write whatever they want and some money is deducted from that escrow account and sent to them.

Secondly, we're creating a referral network. Using a company we like called ReferNow, we've created a way to offer our friends and clients rewards for referring their friends and clients to AdSymetrix.

For each of these systems, we've created AdSymetrix Tracking Tools, and over the next few weeks will be able to definitively know which of these systems work for us and could work for you.

So keep an eye out, and let us know what you're doing in your business. Advertising should work, and together with AdSymetrix, we can all make smarter advertising decisions

Follow Your Leads

When you're looking for new business, you have lots of options. You can buy an email list and blast out a hopefully targeted message, create a referral program and entice your current customer base to somehow bring new people to your door, you can advertise in new publications, buy outdoor ads or hire a kid from down the street to walk around town in a sandwich board.

All of these options could work, but how will you know? How do you know whether the person who made a new appointment for next week saw your number in their email, or was given it by a friend or saw your sandwich walker?

AdSymetrix is here to help. We give you the tools you need to tag all of these ads and then track and monitor the responses.

Our system also gives you the control you need to manage the creation of each new lead. Say you do choose to go the sandwich board route. Aside from the fun of humiliating the guy in the sign, you can learn a lot from the responses you get from the ad. Tag your ad with AdSymetrix and every time you get a call from that sandwich board you'll know who's on the other end of the line. We've integrated Google Maps into our application, so you can determine where your new business is geographically centered. And when someone comes in and says that they've seen your humble sandwich board wearer, you can add their information into AdSymetrix and truly understand the value of your advertising efforts.

Give AdSymetrix a try, sign up, click and email tracking are all free.

Marketplace Looks at How to Sell Online

NPR offers a lot of great programming. One example is Marketplace. They're a comprehensive financial report radio show wrapped in the warm blanket of friendly conversation. You get the feeling that the people who are telling stories on the show just happen to have this information in their back pocket and are killing some time explaining things to you while you're waiting on a cup of coffee.

Today, they have an article that has some relevance to our interests. Let's Count The Ways To Sell Stuff Online looks at Craig's List, Buy.com and Facebook's latest combined effort, and Reaql People Real Stuff, a new video selling service that's a cross between You Tube and classified advertising.

The options given are interesting, and may be worthwhile for your business. The interesting part of the story, however, isn't the list of new ways to sell online, but the reason why people are looking to sell online. It seems that more and more audiences are moving away from mass market advertising and moving towards smaller entertainment options. That means that the audience for your next ad will be smaller than it was last year.

And the best way to understand how you can still maximize the value of that audience is to know what ads work, and what ads don't. And you can do that with the help of AdSymetrix.

Tag Your Ad - any ad, anywhere - and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses. You'll know what new ways are working for your business, and what new ways just make for an interesting article on drive-time radio.

Expermenting With Advertising

You want to reach that allusive 18-25 demographic. You make cars. You think, "hey, they play immersive video games, what if we were to create an immersive video game that made owning one of our cars the goal of the game?"

If you're Toyota, you're big enough to experiment. Sometimes, the experiment doesn't quite work out. Take for example the latest campaign for Scion. Toyota's hoping to launch a new 'trendy' car model called the xD by using a surprisingly violent message.

Slate looks at the new campaign and game today, and nicely points out that while the overall strategy may be worthwhile, the execution of that strategy leaves mixed messages. The goal of the game associated with the new xD is to kill as many "Sheeples" as you can, ultimately using their blood to fuel your new car.

Toyota would hope that the viewer (or in this case, the player) is left thinking that by owning an xD they've destroyed the sheep-like conformity plaguing the car buying public. But the feeling most people get is that owning an xD makes you a bad person.

Experimentation is good. It helps you understand the boundaries of your marketing message and find new ways to connect with your target audiences. The key to any experiment is to find a way to evaluate the results. AdSymetrix has been created to make that kind of evaluation simple and easy. Just Tag Your Ad and watch as AdSymetrix tracks and monitors your responses. You'll know what ads are working and what ads are wasting your time.