Advertise your photography services effectively

Paid advertising is often frowned upon by many business owners, purely because using Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, Paid Blog Posts and so forth are really hard to track in terms of return on investment. But what if I can tell you that you can actually measure this to see which stream is working well and thus remove the ones you aren’t, allowing you to move budget into those that are. I think you’d smile and ask me for more information.

When you go about creating an advert to place on a website, blog or wherever, you’ll naturally provide the party doing the advertising with a link, for example, www.chrisphotography.co.za – This is how the advertiser will link back to your website. Now, in Google Analytics you can obviously look under referrals to see which sites are sending you traffic, but this isn’t the ideal way because you might have many campaigns running across similar websites and so forth, creating a management nightmare.

The good news is that Google provides a marketing URL/Link builder, which assists you in tracking which advertising campaigns are working best for you.

There are 3 main parts to the URL builder:

The other two parts are Campaign Term and Campaign Content, these aren’t required and for the sake of keeping things simple I’m going to leave them out for now. Once you completed the form by filling in your website address, campaign source, campaign medium and campaign name, you can click the Generate URL button and you’ll be given your unique URL/Link. As an example you might have something like this:

http://www.chrisphotography.co.za/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=landscapes

What you can see here is that I am running a Cost Per Click (CPC) campaign on Facebook for my Landscapes. These three pieces of information are then stored inside your Google Analytics account and you’re able to see which campaign is performing best. For comparison sakes, another URL/Link might be:

http://www.chrisphotography.co.za/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=portraits

The difference between this link and previous one is that I’m advertising my Portraits, not my Landscapes, which allows me to track both to compare which one is leading to more business.

Right, so how do you see this information?

Log into your Google Analytics account, click to Traffic Sources and then to All Traffic Sources. On the right hand side of your screen, you’ll see the top ten referring sources to your website, and in the second left most column, you’ll see the header Source/Medium. Alongside this is a bluish drop down menu with “None” written on it. Click this and you’ll see a whole assortment of options available to you, but what’s important is Source, Medium, Campaign, etc. next to All and the textfield on the left. You can click on these options (source, medium, campaign) to view all related results, or you can type text into the textfield to perform a search.

This process of viewing the results is rather complex and it will take you a little time before you master it, but take your time, don’t be scared and with time and practice, you’ll see how powerful measuring your leads can be. Why? Because once you know what works, you’ll know how to get new business easily!