CPM, ROI and Creativity! Is Marketing GDI a Science or an Art?
Hello Friend,
If it seems like all of our the top income-earners in GDI are each doing things a little differently, you’re right. Creativity and thinking outside of the box plays a big role in attracting new prospects to the GDI business.
However, SCIENCE is just as important…
The people who are doing the best at making money in GDI are carefully balancing the art of creative promotion with the science of tracking results, making adjustments and then doing even better on their next promotion.
While sitting at your computer, you might think you have come up with the perfect advertisement for GDI. It’s catchy, it gets your point across and it’s edgy enough that people are going to click it and maybe even remember it, right?
Well, maybe.
The strange thing about advertising is that you never know what works until you try and test it scientifically. There have been times when a promotion we thought was excellent completely flopped when tested with actual prospects. We’re not embarrassed to admit that because it’s all part of the marketing process. You won’t find winners without finding the losers too, and usually first.
We would estimate that 90% of our affiliates never test and track what’s working for them. Do you?
If you pay money to run an ad, do you have any way of knowing if it’s getting results or if it’s worth your money? That’s good knowledge to possess, don’t you agree? If an ad is working great for you, generating leads and signups and basically making you a lot more money than it’s costing you, it’s a safe bet that you can run that same ad in more places similar to the venue or medium that you are now, and it will do well there too.
The problem is that most people never take the time or effort to setup tracking to see what’s working for them. Many of you have probably produced a killer ad and never even knew it, from lack of testing.
It’s great to think creatively and artistically, but it’s even better to think creatively and artistically while also being scientific about every ad you place and every dime you spend on marketing and promotion. If there’s one thing we know every one of the highly successful Internet companies have in common, it’s a great marketing department that knows how to manage and evaluate the data behind the sales, so that more and more sales come in.
Let’s talk about the two acronyms you see in the title of this article, CPM and ROI. Do you know what they mean?
CPM, in advertising lingo, means “Cost Per Thousand”. In other words, your advertising CPM is what you pay for 1,000 pairs of eyeballs to see your advertising message. It’s one of the the things that might help determine your advertising budget with a company. If one place to advertise costs three times as much as another, it still might be a much better deal if the CPM is lower. The lower your Cost Per Thousand, the better.
CPM is just one of the various scientific terms used in advertising. Consider some others you’ll find on the Internet. CPA means “Cost Per Action”. When you’re purchasing leads, you might pay for them on a CPA basis, with the “action” being someone on the Internet filling out your lead generation form. CPC is similar to CPA. It stands for “Cost Per Click”. This is what pay per click search engines use for bidding. You bid what you’re willing to pay per click.
All of the above help you determine the master of all numbers, your ROI – Return on Investment. Your “Return on Investment” is how much money you made above and beyond what you spent on advertising. To determine ROI, you must carefully be tracking what advertising is leading to your sales. If you run an ad for $10 and you know it leads to $20 in commissions, then your ROI is positive. You made more than you spent. In this case, it’s a safe bet to run that same ad again.
If you spend $10 on advertising and you only make $5, then your ROI is negative. Your ad in this case should be adjusted and retested.
The purpose of this article is not to teach you everything there is to know about the science behind advertising, but rather to let you know that there is a scientific side of advertising, and you should be pursuing other means of learning about it. It could play a vital role in your success or failure.
You can be doing everything else right and still not succeed if you don’t track your results. That alone is reason enough to do some exploration of your own on this topic and begin seeing your marketing results in a new light. Your success may be closer than you think, perhaps even one simple change away.