Get an edge over your competition

One of the golden rules in online business is to analyze your competitors. This not only helps you understand them, but gives you valuable insight into how you can compete effectively against them.

Quite often, checking out your competition also leads to new ideas — which can help you make informed decisions on marketing, branding and all the important SEO tactics used to better position your website on search engines!

If you don`t try out what your competition is doing, you will be losing out on sales and on gaining new customers.

Chances are your competition is using the same practice we mentioned in building Microsites. With ShopFactory Gold, you can build multiple sites and have all your orders go into the same Total Care — Online Order Management Account to streamline your after sales administration tasks. You can also use the same payment processing system you already use for ALL your microsites. This eliminates all of the costs tied to opening secondary online stores for your company and products. That`s one of the major benefits of using Total Care Solutions by ShopFactory — one account lets you manage many online stores with No added extra costs!

Total Care also includes a tool you might not know about: Advertising Tracking.

Advertising Tracker lets you set-up tracking for online advertising and other individual action campaigns. Each action can be reported on and viewed at a glance, and tracked separately so you can see what marketing activity is working well for you. All sales leading in from individual campaigns are tied to the sales from your main website and microsite(s), so you can see who purchased through the campaign. You can also click on individual orders within the advertising tracking to view specific customer and order details. That insight can further help you refine customized marketing activities down the road.

In the case of building microsites — you can set-up newsletter campaigns to promote those sites, and include the Advertising Tracking in each newsletter. Any sales that occur as a result of someone buying through a tracked newsletter microsite action, will be captured in the tracking reports. This way you can gauge responses from newsletters, or other action campaigns and build upon what works to drive in more sales, and what doesn’t.

Of course, the advertising tracking isn’t just limited to newsletters, or banner ads on the web. You can use it to track sales from PDF documents (IE: Product sheets and brochures), Direct Email Marketing Promos using Voucher Codes, or any other online linking activity you do to draw in traffic and sales.

That’s one major advantage you will have over your competition!