Two Ways To Track Your Advertising Campaigns

You will spend some dollars on an advertising campaign... It could be a promotional email that you bought from an ezine publisher or a banner advertising or a special link on your friends web site or a discount offer to your subscribers...

Once you set up, don't you want to know how many sales you have made? Or how many subscribers signed up your list?

So how to track a campaign?

METHOD ONE: Setting up a new sales page or subscription thank you page:

Say you have a product called myproduct at http:%%site.com/myproduct.html (I used % to stop hyperlinking this false URL)

You can rename the same sales page to myproduct1.html and upload to a folder called 'content' or whatever you want. Now the new URL becomes http:%%site.com/content/myproduct1.html

Now keep an unique payment link on this page. So if the buyer pays you through this link means, he/she came from that particular campaign.

Remember few things -

* Use this unique URL in only one campaign, so to see the results of that campaign.

* Add a line to the robots.txt file in your root folder, so search engines won't crawl the new page and index. This way you can exclude visitors from search engines.

More on robots.txt: http://www.webmasters-central.com/wp/se/robotstxt.shtml

So after campaign, log-in in to your weblogger like awstats (this should be enabled by your host and most hosts provide these) and check visitors to that myproduct1.html. Get the list of buyers used that unique payment link.

So if you spent $40.00 on a campaign and got 100 visitors from awstats statistics with 4 sales from that sale link. If each sale amount is $25.00, then your returns are $100.00. Profits would be $60.00. That's it!

Awstats can be used to track 'thank you for subscribing pages' after subscriptions.

Advantages -

* No upfront cost.
* Easy to set up.

Disadvantages -

* Very crude method and just gives a rough idea on how a campaign worked.
* Tedious if you have many campaigns.
* Difficult to track exact clicks.

METHOD TWO: Using a click tracker and ROI tracker script:

You can buy a script that tracks the email clicks or visitors. This little script will track the IP, referrer, date and time of the click. http://www.scripts4webmasters.com/clicktracking/index.shtml

You can set up a campaign and create a link. This link you can keep in your emails or advertisements or banner links.

So what a Click tracking script should tell you?

* Tell the number of clicks to calculate the click through ratio
* Tell the IP address of the visitor
* Tell the geographical distribution of the clicks
* Tell the date and time of clicks
* Referrers
* Clicks by time and date
* Returns on a campaign

Advantages -

* Easy to manage multiple campaigns and links.
* More accurate than above new page uploading method.
* Easy to track clicks and visitors.

Disadvantages -

* A little cost involved in buying and setting up the script.
* You should have minimum knowledge about installing script. But in long run this method is a better option than the first method.