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23 Ways To Use An Ad Tracker
by Harvey Segal
Published on this site: June 10th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
The ad tracker was originally developed to provide a record of
all hits to a site resulting from ad placements. This article shows
a host of different ways to utilise an ad tracker.
- FOR AFFILIATES
The Long Url Problem
Have you ever seen an ad where you are asked to click on an affiliate
URL so long that it stretches over 2 lines, like this
http://www/anysite.com/...123RT&type=102
35&subid=89715
Do you think your reader will bother to do the necessary
cut and paste to put it in a browser?
Probably not.
And that's probably one lost sale.
And even a one line affiliate link may exceed the permissible
length for some ad posting requirements.
The solution: use a short tracking URL.
Losing Your Affiliate Code
As an affiliate you may have your affiliate code embedded in a
link something like this:
http://www.abc.com/123
Some customers will bypass the affiliate code and just type in
the home URL http://www.abc.com
(possibly because they think that they will be paying extra for
an agent's commission)
The solution: use a tracking URL - so that your affiliate
code number is never seen.
Make Your Ad Stand Out
You may have seen search engine results showing near identical
listings for the same product, differing only in an affiliate
code appended to the URL.
Your listing here will be just one of many unless you make it
stand out. So bypass the standard affiliate URL and use a tracking
URL.
How Effective Are The Links
You can measure and compare the effectiveness of the different
banners or text links the affiliate programs provide you by using
a tracking URL.
Changing Links
If an affiliate company change their links then your existing
ads, wherever they are posted, become worthless. But if you use
a tracking URL you simply revise the affiliate URL at the tracking
control centre.
Affiliate Program Discontinued
Similarly if an affiliate program is discontinued you just change
your tracking URL to a new page where you explain the circumstances
and point your visitor to your other promotions.
Better Affiliate Stats
Not all affiliate programs provide you with stats about visitors.
And if they do are they adequate ?
Compare a basic monthly figure say - Jan: 39 hits
with a detailed analysis such as
- Jan 12: 10 hits
- Jan 13: 2 hits
- Jan 20: 21 hits
- Jan 21: 6 hits
where you can relate those dates to particular ad campaigns.
Tracking URLs will give you these improved figures.
Checking Affiliate Stats
Even if you do receive good stats from your affiliate program
it still makes sense to use tracking URLs so that you can compare
your figures with theirs.
A large discrepancy could mean errors in their software or (hopefully
not) fraudulent activity on their part.
An alternative reason is that their measurement takes place when
their page is fully loaded rather than at the start, indicating
that visitors are clicking away because it is taking too long
to load.
- FOR EZINE PUBLISHERS
Win Advertisers With Tracking Reports
If you sell advertising space in your ezine you can offer to your
advertisers to replace their URLs with your tracking URLs and
Email them the results.
Tell your advertisers about these benefits in your advertising
guidelines
They will know the number of clickthroughs their ad has
generated. They can then decide how to improve the ads for
better performance
If they use a tracker program with your own domain name in the
tracking URL your ezine subscribers will be more inclined to click
They can use your ezine as a test centre, modifying their ads
until they are happy, before launching with other publishers
Use Tracking Report Results
The tracking reports above will provide you with information on
your subscribers' interests, influencing your editorial content
and helping you select which potential advertisers to approach.
Also, once your advertisers have seen for themselves the benefits
of an ad tracking program they will be inclined to purchase one.
So set yourself up as an affiliate for a program and promote it
to them.
Measure Your Readership
You may know how many subscribers you have but how many
actually open and read your ezine and which parts of it
attract most attention ?
Here's how to find out if you distribute your ezine in HTML Format:
include an image on your page, e.g a banner or logo or a single
pixel GIF. Then reference this image with a tracking URL.
For an ezine distributed as plain text it is not possible to see
if it is actually opened or read. But what you can do is insert
tracking URLs at the appropriate points, such as product offers
or special articles, and get comparative figures for which items
are being read.
- AT YOUR WEB SITE
The Problem Of Permanent URLs
Web sites are continually evolving and changing.
You may want to rename a page to make it more consistent
and logical but there's a huge problem. You have given out
the URL in an ebook, or a directory submission, or an article
or wherever. There's no way you can undo this.
The solution ?
Never provide the actual URL, just a tracking URL. You can then
just edit the link at the tracking centre whenever a page is moved
or renamed.
The external links, in your ebook for example, stay the same but
they will redirect to your new page.
What Are Your Visitors Doing ?
You have text links all over your site, links to your other pages
and links to recommended sites.
Where are your visitors clicking ?
Where are they leaving your site, why, how can you stop them ?
Which graphic do they click on the most ?
Do they click on the text link more than the graphic link?
Your log files may tell you at best which are the most popular
pages at your site but it is vital to know how your visitors move
through your site and what is tempting them.
Use tracking URLs to replace actual links wherever you need to
monitor click activity.
Sell Website Advertising Space
You can offer tracking reports to your advertisers in the same
way as for ezine publishers (above).
Stop Piracy
If you have invested man-months of time setting up a vital resource
site involving a directory of links it's very easy for a pirate
to simply copy your page and provide useful content for his own
site.
If you use tracking URLs for those directory links you can detect
this copy - because the ad tracking program will record the referring
URL.
At the same time of course you can measure the popularity of the
directory links.
- USING PAY PER CLICK SEARCH ENGINES
Better Click Activity Reporting
Pay per click search engines will report to you click activity
on your URL. Engines vary in the frequency and format of the reporting
so you can use tracking URLs instead to obtain better information.
Prevent Fraudulent Activity
You can compare your figures with the engine's and should query
any large discrepancy.
If click activity is unusually high you may have a competitor
clicking on just to incur costs against you. You may be able to
detect this by comparing the figures for unique hits and actual
hits (several hits per visitor).
- OFFLINE MARKETING
Check How Successful
If you have ever wondered whether it was worth advertising off
line because of the supposed impossibility of measuring the response
then ad tracking URLs will answer that problem. Just include them
in your ads in
- newspapers
- magazines
- flyers
- billboards
- press releases
- shop notice boards
- and so on
Use The Time Reports
The date and time when clicks are made will allow you to check
the progress of your ads, for example
- has your newspaper ad been submitted yet ?
- has your billboard notice been removed ?
- how long does a magazine ad stay around ?
For a long running ad you can study the response and switch
the link midstream if necessary to an improved web page.
- EBOOKS
Do Free Books Work ?
The main purpose of a free ebook is to get the reader back to
your site. But how successful is it proving ?
Put tracking URLs in the book and you will find out.
Maintain Control After Download
Once your ebook is downloaded it would appear that you no longer
have any control over it. Not so. You can redirect the reader
to other pages of your site by changing the tracking Url links.
- OTHER WAYS
Become An Ad Tracking Affiliate
Since ad tracking programs are high demand marketing tools you
can profit by joining their affiliate program (if they have one).
Owning the product that you promote always gives that extra
advantage e.g you can give an example of how you use it
or a personal testimonial as to how it has benefited you.
Privacy
You may want to post an URL somewhere and - for reasons of your
own not let it reveal your website. You can do this with an ad
tracking program where the supplier domain name is used in the
tracking URL.
For more details about the above tips and yet more ways to
use an ad tracker see Harvey's free ebook Ad Tracking
SuperTips http://www.ad-tracking.com/adbook.html
Publishers can reproduce this article and change the URL to
point to their own rebranded version. The Digital Millennium
Copyright Act http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR
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