How To Create An Ad Tracker

How to create an "ad" tracker By Steven Currie of YouSendTheCards.com Why You Want to Create An Ad Tracker This is how you create an advertisement tracker. You want to do this so you know in general how much traffic an advertisement or article or any other web traffic idea created. You will be able to capture how many hits/clicks each ad generated. This will give you a per click cost. The lower the per click cost, the more effective the ad. For example if you placed one ad on ABC web site for $20.00 and you got 100 hits, that would be a per click cost of .20 cents per click. If you placed a $20.00 ad on XYZ web site and you got 50 clicks, would be a per click cost of .40 cents per click, a higher per click cost. That might tell you that you might want to spend more money on ads in ABC web site. You may decide not to advertise on XYZ web site again. Another thing you should do is EVERY time you place a new ad on ABC web site set up a tracker for it so you can see if the number of clicks is decreasing or increasing. You could also base that on an increasing or decreasing cost per click. You should be able to set up a fairly simple Excel spreadsheet to track all of your ads.I would suggest at minimum the following columns: Date of Ad Where placed # of hits/clicks $Spent Cost/hit You should set up ad trackers for every ad, including off-line print or magazine ads. If you post in forums, you should set up one for all the forums. Since Magnetic Sponsoring is the first thing I will be heavily advertising, I will be setting up trackers for that. Make sure if you do forum posts to set up one for that, because, remember that may generate web traffic. Overview of the Process of Creating An Ad Tracker To break the ad tracking down when someone actually clicks on your link in an ad or forum post or wherever, it looks like this. I am going to use my web site name for this example. I created a special page tailored to real estate agents where I wanted to drive traffic. The link for that page is: http://www.yousendthecards.com/yousendthecards/id21.html I use a software package called EasyTracker to track my hits. In EasyTracker, I created a "tracker" link. This is the one I publish for ads. You can use a "redirector" like tinyurl or make up a shorter link that will redirect to this on. That link looks like: http://mywaytofreedom.com/cgi-bin/mpacks/ad.cgi?RealEstateEZ1 (I have my tracking software on another web site, but you can keep it all on one web site.) So when they click on that link it will take them to the EasyTracker link. The counter counts each hit. It then redirects them from the instructions we have set up for tracking this ad back to the real estate web page: http://www.yousendthecards.com/yousendthecards/id21.html Now, this is just an overview of the process. I can recommend a good free ebook on this topic by Harvey Segal at one of his websites: http://www.ad-tracking.com/adbook.html This will tell you a great deal more than this short article. If you haven't signed up for the FREE E~Biz Newsletter, which contains articles like this and has free time saving and productivity software, you should check it out.Send an email to freebiz@yousendthecards.com and it will give you more information. Steven Currie Local San Diego Toll Free 858-712-6272 866-211-8012 (Daytime Pacific Time) 858-560-4752 866-574-6262 (Evening/Weekend) Steven@YouSendTheCards.com http://www.yousendthecards.com/ With SendOutCards.com system you can create sophisticated mailing campaigns that will run rings around your competition. Talk to Steven Currie