Frequently Asked Questions
Why must I Use Ad Tracking?
Every business must advertise.
The more effective your ads - the greater your profits.
So how do you make your ads more effective?There's only two factors
1. The content - the words you use in your headline and the body
2. The location where you place your adAnd, as the expert marketers will tell you, by constant experimenting, changing, tweaking and testing you'll eventually find the best combination.
Simple as that... Except for one thing.
How do you carry out the testing ?
As visitors flock to your website how do you know which ad has brought them there ? Are they coming from:
a banner ad
a newsgroup ad
a signature tag
a published article
a free link posting
an auto responder campaign
a reciprocal link
an affiliate program
a free classified ad
an e-zine ad
a forum posting
an email marketing campaign
Wouldn't you like to know
which of these received the best response
whether free classified sites are worth the effort
which e-zines are the most profitable
how a sponsored e-zine ad compares to the standard one
whether animated banners are better than static ones
how effective are your email signatures: does the one with the word "free" in the headline fare best
does the ad at the start of an e-zine outperform the one at the end
and so on
There's only one way to find out the answers to all these questions and to really know the effectiveness of every single ad, banner, link that you run.
You MUST use an ad tracking program.
How does ad tracking work?
It's very simple
you don't have to change anything at your web site
you don't have to examine your web site logs
you don't have to make copies of your web pages
You just replace the URL that you want to place in your ad with a 'tracking' URL which we will give you.
Let's have an example.
Suppose you want to run an ad campaign by placing an ad in the XYZ newsletter for a product at your web page http://www.yoursite.com
You first decide on a special code/description unique to this campaign, in this case a code "XYZ newsletter" would be suitable.Then you just tell the ad tracking program to provide you with the tracking URL for http://www.yoursite.com with a code "XYZ newsletter"
As simple as that, you just feed in 2 pieces of information. (The beauty of TrackThatAd.com is that you can set these up in seconds).The system then provides you with a new URL - a tracking URL - and this is the one that you place in the ad.
So now when someone reads that ad and clicks on the new URL they will be taken to http://www.yoursite.com and the ad tracking system will register that the click came from your XYZ newsletter campaign.
What information does TrackThatAd.com provide ?
At the basic level TrackThatAd.com records when your URL has been clicked. It can detect where your visitor came from (the referring URL), the browser and operating system and the exact time. It can record total hits and unique hits (i.e. where one visitor may click several times)
This data is kept in the system so you can then pull off reports on any ad campaign over any period e.g. by month, day or even by hour.
You can go online at any time and view your stats, which will be immediately up to date. If someone clicked on your ad just a second ago this information will already be available in the system.
Where or how can I use it?
For Affiliates
For E-zine Publishers
At your Web Site
Using Pay Per Click Search Engines
Offline Marketing
E-books
other ways
For Affiliates
(1) The long URL problemHave 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/cgi-bin/dir1/dir2/.cgi?code=123RT&type=102
35&subid=89715Do 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
(2) 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
(3) 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.
(4) 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.
(5) 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.
(6) 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.
(7) 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 hitswith a detailed analysis such as
Jan 12: 10 hits
Jan 13: 2 hits
Jan 20: 21 hits
Jan 21: 6 hitswhere you can relate those dates to particular ad campaigns. Tracking URLs will give you these improved figures.
(8) 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 E-zine Publishers
(1) Win advertisers with tracking reportsIf you sell advertising space in your e-zine 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 click-throughs 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 e-zine subscribers will be more inclined to click
They can use your e-zine as a test centre, modifying their ads until they are happy, before launching with other publishers
(2) 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 trackthatAd.com and promote it to them.
(3) Measure your readership
You may know how many subscribers you have but how many actually open and read your e-zine and which parts of it attract most attention ?
Here's how to find out if you distribute your e-zine 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 e-zine 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
(1) The problem of permanent URLsWeb 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 e-book, 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 TrackThatAd.com whenever a page is moved or renamed. The external links, in your e-book for example, stay the same but they will redirect to your new page
(2) 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 visitor moves through your site and what is tempting them. Use tracking URLs to replace actual links wherever you need to monitor click activity.
(3) Sell website advertising space
You can offer tracking reports to your advertisers in the same way as for ezine publishers (above)
(4) 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
(1) Better click activity reportingPay per clicks 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.
(2) 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
(1) Check how successfulIf 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
(2) 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
E-books
(1) Do free books work ?The main purpose of a free e-book 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.
(2) Maintain control after download
Once your e-book 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
(1) Become a TrackThatAd.Com affiliateSince ad tracking programs are high demand marketing tools you can profit by joining TrackthatAd.Com.
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.
(2) 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.
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