The Importance of Tracking.

By Stuart Reid

If you are starting out this is most definately the last thing on your mind, but it shouldnt be. Its nice to get in the habit now. What is tracking? It is simply the various methods you may use to find out how many all the people respond to each promotional exercise you run.

If you have a web site with a counter or some kind of statistics record on your pages then you will now how many many people visit your web page , plus maybe some other useful understanding such as referring URLs or whatever. What you will not know is where these many people learned about your web page . If you pay for anything then this understanding is essential.

Say you have a page that sells widgets. You run one advert as a solo-advertisement to an e-zine that has 100,000 subscribers.

You run another ad to an e-zine that has 300,000 subscribers. This one is worded differently.

Your internet site , after a while, reports you have recieved about 20,000 more hits than you usually do and you discover your sales are up by 20%.

This is sizeably good news. You decide to run an ad again. But how do you know which advertisement you run was most succesful? You needed to track the links in those ads, so each advertisement would send the visitor to a different URL.

There are sizeably good linking services such as ROIbot. This kind of service takes links sent to them, counts them, and redirects them to your page. This way you can log into the service and see how many visitors you had to a particular hyperlink.

The main disadvantage of this is that the hyperlink can look a little messy, something like "http://www.trackerservice.com/?username= xxxx&trackercode=xxxx". It will also likely cost money for the accomadation . If you may utilize cgi on your website you can host your own `backlink counter`. These scripts will either track links to a page, eg "http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/track.cgi? http://www.some-otherpage.html" which is quite flexible but doesnt `hide` urls, or they will use codes to shorten the URL and take a neater form such as "http://www.mysite. com/cgi-bin/track.cgi?link1". In practice hosting your own tracker works well and gives you a lot of flexibility.

Another way is to send your visitor to a different URL on your page . In ad 1 for example you say "Visit www.mysite.com/ad1 for more experience." and in ad 2 utilize "Visit www.mysite. com/specials" (a term like "specials" might even make someone more likely to click on what is no more than a coded link). The counter on "ad1" (which in this case would be a different directory on your page ) would tell you how many people responded to this advertisement , and vice versa. Some counters will even count links such as "www.mysite.com/?ad1" as a seperate hit for you. This saves you setting up other pages or directories. One of the main advantages of this form of hyperlink is the URL just looks like a proper page on your page . The page itself could be no more than a redirection to an affiliate page or a sign-up page.

If you are not aware of how to redirect pages it is quite simple. Your page, for example "specials.html" would take this form:

HTML
HEADTITLEYour Affiliate Program Title/TITLE META http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www. YouraffiliateprogramsURL.com" /HEADBODYBGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"/BODY/HTML

Once you have this tracking acquired skill it is sometimes suprising to learn, that for example,the advertisement you run to 100,000 subscribers gave you 15,000 of the extra hits you gained and the advertisement you run to 300,000 subscribers only gave you 5,000. You would have probably thought the other way round had you not tracked those ads. You would obviously be willing to run advertisement 1 again to a larger subscriber base!

Tracking your ads is important.

Do not skip it!