Ad Tracking On A Budget
by Cynthia Bowman

Many entrepreneurs already know it is very important
for you to keep track of your ad campaigns. Every
successful marketer keeps a log to determine which
advertisements drew the most 'hits.' This should be
compared to the number of sales or signups you received as
a result of those hits. With this analysis you can decide
which campaigns were most successful and can be used again,
or which ones bombed, in which case it's back to the
drawing board for those ads!

Start Your Own Pay for Performance Marketing

There are several choices you can make to track
advertising. The most common way is to pay for referral
tracking through a service such as ROIbot, My Simple
System, etc. You may also buy CGI script to place on your
website. Which ones are best suited to your needs and
your budget is strictly up to you. What many do not know
is a simple, inexpensive trick to track many of your
campaigns using HTML! What are the positive and
negative aspects of each choice?

CGI SCRIPTS - You purchase the script from one of many
sources and install the script on your website. If you
have some technical knowledge you should be able to install
it yourself, otherwise you may need some assistance from
your web host. Most likely you will be charged an
installation fee if you require assistance. Another
possibility is to use your favorite search engine to find
sources to teach you CGI so you can perform your own
installations. You will require a web host that provides
access to the cgi-bin, so it is unlikely that free websites
will have this capability. Your tracking URL's are in your
own domain name.

ONLINE REFERRAL SERVICE - The tracking program is hosted on
the referral site, not on your own site. You pay a monthly
or yearly fee for use of the program. There is no
installation necessary on your part. Program upgrades are
provided transparently by the referral service. Your
tracking URL's are under the referral services domain name.
You are limited only by the number of URL's the service
will provide you.

HTML TRACKING - Here is a little known secret that will
cost you nothing if you already have your own website and a
host that provides statistical reporting. When you list an
ad and the URL ends in .htm or .html, you may add a
question mark "?" and an alpha/numeric code that makes
sense to you, to identify your particular campaign.

Start Your Own Pay for Performance Marketing

For instance, if I was placing my first ad in 'Ezines
Anonymous' for Full Success Marketing News and my URL was
directed to the page on my site that tells about my ezine,
I might place the URL in the ad as follows:

Full Success Marketing News
Marketing News for All Entrepreneurs
Beginner, Experienced, or anywhere in between!
http://fullsuccess.biz/news.html?ezanon1

In this example my URL will refer an interested person to
my website at the 'news.html' page. It will not matter
what is after the question mark at this point. When I
finally check my web statistics later, I should find a
table or chart telling me all 'referrer' links. This is
where the information after the question mark helps you
track your advertising campaigns. I would be able to see
how many hits I received on a particular page for a
particular alpha/numeric code.

Of course this does not work if you do not have your own
website and only have several affiliate sites that provide
you with your own replicated site and their own URL coding.

You can use this method for the affiliate sites, though, if
you have a marketing center on your own web host, use the
HTML ad tracking technique to provide URL's to your
website, where you would then provide links on your
webpages to your various affiliate sites.

============================================
Cynthia Bowman owns and operates Full Success Marketing,
dedicated to providing a variety of resources to help
internet and network marketing businesses become more
successful. She also publishes a weekly eZine full of
informative marketing information. Visit the Full Success
Marketing website at http://fullsuccess.biz.