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You need to know how you spend your traffic-building money and also how you spend your time, in terms of what is working, what is not... And you also need to know where your profits are coming from...
For the former situation, you'll have to set up special ad tracking off-site links.
For the latter one, the merchants whom you are affiliated with, will provide you with the on-site links - and if you have your own online store, you'll  also require appropriate ad tracking software, in order to track sales properly - not just visitors...
Alternatively, you can also install your own CGI script...

You'll have to create these links specifically to track the success of your off-site promotional campaigns. To that effect, you'll have to place a different link in each of your promotional campaigns, so that it becomes easier to track. In this way, when your prospect clicks on your special ad tracking link, he first goes to a script that records the click, and where it came from. Then, it sends your prospect to the final destination webpage within your site.

These ad tracking programs are supposed to provide you with the following:

• total clicks coming in for all your special links, and also the number of clicks for each special ad tracking link that you set up.
• 1st time versus repeat clicks. You'll know if your visitor who is clicking on your link, clicked on it before or not.

You now will have a powerful way of ascertaining the precise traffic-building success (or lack of...) of every off-site promotional campaign, whether you are...

• purchasing ads in ezines
• bidding for keywords on pay per click search engines
• posting a comment in your favourite newsgroup
• links from a free ebook you are promoting
• links from any email of yours, and more...

Testing your ezine ads is particularly useful, because it will allow you to measure which of your ads is generating a better response. It'll allow you, e.g. run Ad A in ezine 1 and Ad B in ezine 2, then a week later you may swap the previous combination and be able to evaluate which of the 2 campaigns was more profitable.

Testing web-based advertising becomes also particularly effective, because the use of these special ad tracking links will allow you to track the performance of each banner, pay per click search engine, or your posts in Internet discussion groups.

Now let us look at other half of the equation, i.e. the part that generates profits for you... Yes, I know this is what you like to hear about. I won't disappoint you! Stay with me a while longer. :-)

As you know, click-through occur when your visitors click on a link and leave your site. This is not necessarily bad, if they'll generate profits for you... It all depends where those click-through are going...

• do you own an online store, accepting credit cards? Great! A percentage of those leads will yield you a profit.
• are you a web developer, selling your services online? Excellent! This sales site of yours is an obvious final destination for your incoming visitors. And...
• you probably are an affiliate for several programs... Set up links pointing towards such merchants and monitor closely their conversion into sales or leads... and your profits will grow.

You could even track sales - not just traffic - by creating specific web pages that will track both clicks IN and clicks OUT of your site. All you have to do is, when you place an ad in an e-zine, or bid on keywords with a pay per click search engine, send your prospects to a special, dedicated page on your website. Obviously, such special webpage that you have set up can only be used for such specific promotion at stake - it can not receive links from anywhere else. On such webpage, you'll also have to create new ad tracking links for your affiliate program. If your merchant does not provide you with such feature for their affiliate program, use the free services provided by Snip URL. It is a very user-friendly service!

Say you create a pay per click campaign...

By setting a special webpage for this campaign of yours (it can be a simple duplicate of one of your site's pre-existing pages), you'll be able to know with precision that this pay per click listing brought in this many visitors to your site, of which this many visitors clicked on to your specific merchant or your online store... i.e. a complete follow through of your visitors behavior, for each promotional campaign. And since you know the conversion rate for each of your merchants (or your online store), you'll be able to decide whether you should carry on advertising with your current ezine or pay per click engine, or not.

Finally, let me give you another useful tip in this regard, which I personally use quite often... You could also create a small text file (with your Note Pad), and place this HTML code given below within the HEAD tags:

*<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="0;
URL=http://www.AFFILIATE_LINK.com">*

And obviously, where it says AFFILIATE_LINK above, replace it with the actual link that you wish to promote. Save the file and give it a name, with the HTML extension. Then, upload it to your server, where you have your site hosted and place it in the main folder. From now on, you could simply promote this shorter link...

*http://YOUR_OWN_SITE.com/aff_link.html*

without having to promote the affiliate link given to you by the merchant.

Another good method is to generate a 'cloaked' affiliate page, because in this fashion you'll also protect your affiliate commissions. Please check here, for additional information about Affiliate Defender and how you could derive benefits with this user-friendly software.

But if you do not wish to manually create an HTML redirect page, log into your server and then upload the file (too cumbersome!), there are good alternatives... such as installing your own CGI script at your server.

With a good CGI script, you can quickly zip through all of the stats for every single one of your links, ads, or campaigns with the push of a button, even if you have several web sites.

You won't have to...

• Mess around with dozens of campaigns until it becomes hard to keep track of them all.
• Click ten different buttons just to see the traffic for all your campaigns.
• Create and upload new html pages each time you want to track your ads.
• Squint your eyes to look at messy, disorganized stats.
• Wait 30 seconds or more for a simple report.
• Put a graphic on all of your pages which is just plain annoying, and causes you to lose some of your hard earned traffic.
• Depend on other people's servers -- which could go offline at anytime, and are overloaded with thousands of users -- to track your ads.

With a CGI script installed on your server, you control over ALL of your links, ads and campaigns - and without paying monthly fees!

For each one of your campaigns, essentially you'll get...

• referring URLs
• what browsers your visitors have installed
• what operating systems your visitors are using
• hits per hour, per day, and hits per month for all campaigns and sub-campaigns (more on sub-campaigns later)

And you even don't need a website to use this CGI script - which means that you could use it in your own ezine...

It is also very easy to install. It could be up and running on your web site, ready to start tracking all of your ads in just 30 minutes!
 

Finally, if you are looking for an ad tracking script that also tracks sales (besides clicks, actions and redirects), you should consider Dyna Tracker. Please click here, in order to watch our screen cam video showing how conversion tracking takes place, with a very specific example of an ongoing ad campaign running at Google AdWords.

With DynaTracking  Pro, this powerful PHP script runs at your own server. [Click here for our screen cam video illustrating how conversion tracking takes place with this powerful script]

 

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