The Importance Of Ad Tracking

One thing all professional marketers who are successful will agree on. If you don't track your ads, you're done for. For those who don't understand why this is so important, you've obviously either haven't spent a lot of time posting ads, or money, or both. Well, when you start to expand your advertising efforts and you find your days are becoming longer and longer and your budget is becoming larger and larger, you're going to want to start to track your ads so you can save yourself some time and money.

Depending on how much advertising you do, this can get to be a rather complex process. The biggest mistake that most people make is that they'll sign up with an ad tracker service, create just one tracking URL and use that URL for every ad they place. While this may still tell them the total number of clicks they've gotten from their efforts and how many visitors have come to their site, this still isn't going to tell them which ads are working and which ads are not. Why is this important?

Let's take an example where a marketer is using 3 different forms of advertising. He's hosting several FFA sites, posting ads to safelists and finally he's posting ads to message boards. The FFA sites usually use SAFE system autoresponders so there's not a lot of time involved since your ads are sent out automatically each day. But FFA sites cost money, so there is an expense involved. Safelists, unless you're using a submitter, are time consuming because you have to go to each one individually to post your ad. And if you are using a submitter, that's an expense as they are not free. And message boards, while they are free, they are very time consuming. So you really want to see what your results are for each of those 3 methods. If you use just 1 tracker URL, you won't know if your hits are coming from the FFA sites, the safelists or the message boards.

There are 3 ways you can go about doing this. You can either use one tracking URL for each type of advertising or you can use a tracking URL for each site or you can use a tracking URL for each ad, assuming that you use different ads for each type of advertising. By using the 3rd method you not only find out which methods are working but which ads within that method work the best.

Can it get a little complicated tracking all those ads and sites? Yes, it can. At one time, I was tracking 100 different sites. But as I discovered which sites worked and which didn't, I was able to eventually just track my promotions by the ads themselves as I eliminated the sites or methods that didn't produce.

To make your ad tracking a little easier, probably the best and most popular site on the Internet for doing this is Adminder. They've been around longer than just about everybody. They have a system that gives you a lot of control. I need to warn you though, for email advertising, you have to cloak their URLs in a tiny URL because of all the spam complaints against their company from others. Of course you should use a Tiny URL anyway as it is easier for people to remember.

Here is the URL for Adminder

ADMINDER

Here is the URL to get a Tiny URL

TINY URL

Ad tracking is absolutely critical if you're going to have a good idea of how your campaigns are performing.

Sincerely,

Lance Drossman
Creator The Key2Succeed - Earn a CEO level Income working 2 hours a day.

http://www.key2succeed.com/