Saturday, January 26, 2008

Top Three Reasons Why You Must Be Using Ad Tracking Software

One of the most vital pieces of software that you should invest in before anything in Internet marketing is a good ad tracker. If you are serious about making money with Internet marketing and want to get the biggest return on investment, you have to track your ads with a good ad tracker.

Without one you are basically marketing blindly and will never know if anything you do is effective or not at converting sales or building a mailing list. One of the best ways to lose money real fast, especially when it comes to placing e-zine solo ads is to send out your ad without having some type of tool to track results.

Below are my top three reasons why you must be using ad tracking software in your daily Internet marketing routine.

1. Learn Where Your Traffic Is Coming From

It is important to know the source of your traffic to your lead capture page or website. You can save a lot of time during your day if you are able to concentrate more on marketing in places where you can see you are pulling more traffic from.

If you do a lot of article marketing or forum marketing with an ad tracker, you can see if one directory or forum pulls in more traffic then the other one and you will be able to concentrate your marketing efforts on source with the higher click-through rate.

There is no sense in promoting an affiliate program and then asking yourself if it is working or not when you do not know what places are more effective in marketing your website.

2. Split-Testing Different Ads For Maximum Click-Through Rate

If you ever used Google Adwords you will notice that there is a section in the account area where you can put different variations of ads and run them in one campaign rotating them evenly so you can see which one performs better. This is what it means to run a split-test.

When you split-test your ads or website copy, you have the ability to see which copy converts better. This is important for people who advertise using Adwords, solo-Ads, classified sites and sales pages where just changing one word could mean the difference between a sale and someone passing it on.

After you split-test your ads for a long time, you will start to see a huge increase in your income when you know which ads people are clicking on more than others. Always run at least 3-4 different variations on an ad and then determine which one is performing better and drop the rest. You can even take it a step further and take your best performing ad and change around word placement and optimize it even more.

3. Tracking Your Return On Investment

Most ad tracking software gives you the ability to track how many sales you get or how many leads you make. This is done by simply placing a hidden code in the thank you page or confirmation page of a website which registers in the ad tracker as an action or sale.

Usually the code is a simple hidden pixel that is embedded in the page that tells the ad tracker that someone has visited and what they purchased. Some ad trackers can even track sales of affiliate programs of products you do not own, although the webmaster of the program would have to agree to place the code on his site which he should not object to because you are only helping him make more money.

When you track your return on investment, you can always re-run campaigns that have made you money and drop ones that don't convert so every time you spend money you will minimize your losses and maximize your gains. This is how everyone online does it.

So you can see without an ad tracker, you are pretty much shooting blindly and hoping to hit a target. If you are interested in ending the frustration of online marketing and not seeing results, you first need to install some ad tracking software before you go about doing anything.

When it comes down to buying an ad tracker you can wither get a web based service for a monthly fee or install it on your own server. I prefer to have my own and be in control.

Click here for an affordable ad tracking software with link cloaking technology.

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