If you’ve been involved in the marketing field for some time, chances are you’ve been told to track your ads.
How do you do this? There are several ways; one that is practically free if you have your own website and others that cost a little but do a lot more for you.
A free method (if you have your own domain/website)
Perhaps the easiest (and least powerful) way to track your ads is by creating a redirect page for every ad you post. The redirect goes to the page that contains your sales message.
Note: This method cannot be handled by the 301 redirect method. If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry. If you know, think about it. You need separate pages for this *tracking* method to work, not the single page that gives you the 301 method.
You can have any number of redirect pages on your website. And then when people visit these pages, your web servers take note of the pages reached and you have your statistics.
My preferred method of doing these redirects is with PHP files. All you have to do is create a new file in a text editor (Windows Notepad, for example) and copy and paste the following:
header(“Location: $URL”);
Departure();
?>
Be sure to use a .php extension for the filename, otherwise this script will not work. For example:
yourdomain.com/yourdeadname.php is a properly named file.
yourdomain.com/yourdeadname.htm It is not.
If for some strange reason your hosting company doesn’t support PHP, you can also get the job done with HTML meta tags. Just create an HTML file and use the following text:
This time you will use the extensions basic.htm or .html, for example, yourdomain.com/yourdeadname.htm
In both examples, be sure to substitute change for the variable yoursalespagehere to the URL you want to promote. Give the file a name and upload it to your server. (How to do this is beyond the scope of this article, but you can Google ftp to find out how. It’s not hard at all.)
Use your redirect URL to promote your offer. When people click the link, your web server will look at the file and you’ll know how your promotions are performing.
On the contrary: its price is included in the cost of maintaining the domain.
Disadvantage: No robust reporting; cumbersome reading.
Use of software
A very good alternative to the above method is to use link tracking software. This software allows you to create a campaign and when you promote the campaign URL, the software records the click. The upside is that link building is simple and the reports tend to be clearer so you can more easily see how your campaigns are doing.
Again, there is a free service that allows you to do this called bit.ly. Just enter the URL of the landing page and then bit.ly will create a tracking link for you. You can customize the link to have a series of links pointing to the same landing page, allowing you to track your ads.
Other services provide better reporting and allow for sub-campaigns. I personally use a paid tracking service because I like the contractual relationship you get when you pay for something. By using free services, you are completely at the mercy of the service; and its terms of service can change on a whim, without you having the right to complain. Fee-based services give me stability I can trust.
Conclution
Regardless of the service or tool you use to track your ads, the main thing is that you track *them*. By doing so, you’ll get important, if not critical, feedback on which ads perform better than others and which don’t work at all.
