Friday Roundup: Am I wasting my advertising dollars?

Welcome to the Friday Roundup. It is Friday, December 9, 2016. Today's topic is, "Am I wasting my advertising dollars" Hello everyone. I'm John Peterson with Develare, and John Wanamaker once said, "Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The question is, which half" John went on to found one of the first successful department stores, and he grew that into sixteen stores and those stores were eventually integrated into Macy's.

Like department stores, one of the easier ways to get traffic to visit your website is to advertise. There are a lot of different options out there for advertising, and the Better Business Bureau is probably a good option as any.

I'm a big fan of the BBB. They also have a local directory section there. You can find plumbers, you can find electricians, and yes, you can even find web designers.

The question is, those visitors that were on the Better Business Bureau website in that local directory area, do they go from there to your site? You can find that out by looking at Google Analytics. There's a section there called referrals. If you dig around there, you can find the referrals section. By the way, if you're having trouble finding that referrals section, just add a comment below. I'll be happy to tell you the exact method to get there, the exact steps to get there.

If you look in that referrals area, you can find entries, and you can find entries from all different websites visiting you. It might be Facebook, might be Twitter, and in there you should find an entry for the BBB. If they're doing you some good, if they're sending visitors your way, you'll see an entry in there from the BBB and they'll be some key stats in there. They'll be stats like how long they were on your site, how many pages did these visitors typically visit, and what's the bounce rate typically for these visitors from the BBB. The bounce rate, for those of you that don't know, without getting too much into the details, is people who come to your site, visit one page, and then they're out of there. If they visit one page and bounce, or visit one page and go somewhere else, that affects your bounce rate. Lower numbers are better.

Anyway. If you want to determine if your advertising dollars are being well spent on Better Business Bureau or any other website like that, you simply go to that referrals area. That will help you determine if that 50% of your ad dollars should go to them or maybe another resource. The same tactic works for other directories. Maybe if you're into Woodland theory, the Woodlands Online is pretty popular here. If you're in Katy, coveringkaty.com has a Yellow Pages over there. There's probably other business directories in your local region or municipality. Keep a look out for those, look for opportunities to advertise, and then track them on Google Analytics in the referrals area.

This has been the Friday Roundup. I'm John Peterson with Develare.