Internet marketing- tracking your results saves you money
Laura Wolf
We probably all heard about the 20/80 rule, haven't we? Well, if not, I will explain it briefly. 20 % of the things you are doing in your business are responsible for 80% of the profit! That means that you are wasting your time money and energy with the other 80%. Shocking, isn't it? When you are just starting up your business you are trying everything that's supposed to work just to get the momentum moving. I know. I was there. I have done just the same thing.
I remember posting ads on hundreds of sites daily opening thousands (literally) of credit based safelist emails, posting text ads, managing PPC campaigns and writing ad copies. I never got to sleep and I still didn't see any results. Then I started to think: there must be a way to see what I am doing right or wrong, honestly, I was feeling like working fully blindfolded. I just had to do something about it. That's when I realized I needed a tracking system set up. So I researched online and to save you time and energy I am sharing this with you. I tried loads of systems, some of them worked better than others.
Tracking your links
Here's the scoop. A link tracker doesn't only track your clicks, but protects your affiliate links at the same time. You must have heard about affiliate commission theft, so if you are using a link that has your username and referrer id within, it can easily be changed, and the lead or sale goes to someone else. Now, if you are an affiliate marketer, like me, it will result in loss of income, so don't just go out there promoting your normal affiliate links. You can still cloak your links, like using a link cloaker but it won't solve your tracking problem. I personally like knowing the exact time when my emails or ads get linked, the source and the IP address as well. So when I am getting that jingly reminder email in my inbox saying: “sale made” and I am not using a pixel on the campaign, I will quickly identify the source of the sale or lead. That's the whole idea about being able to identify the traffic sources that will bring you visitors, sales and most importantly: money. Check out the resources box for some ideas on tracking.
Tracking your opens
If you are advertising via email, and sending out regular promotions, or just link back to your site it is very important to track your opens. Efficient tracking leads to efficient testing and efficient testing will make you more money guaranteed. Period. If your autoresponder has a statistics feature built in that analyzes your clicks and opens that's great. But if not, you have to track your links you put in the email, first to protect them, second to track the opens. The industry average according to Mailchimp ® is 12-14% opens, and 3-4% clicks. If your emails' rate is well below this, you must change something. Try to change the email subject line, and subscribe to your email list from a couple of different email addresses and see if your emails get delivered at all. Unfortunately time after time ISP-s block some servers and maybe the poor open rate is not because your copywriting stinks but because your emails end up in the SPAM folder.
Tracking a PPC campaign
If you are running a PPC campaign it is even more important to track your links, If you are able to do it, you can create a tracking pixel and place it in the body of your confirmation page. If you are not that advanced in HTML you have to find other solutions: You can use a tracking system that reports the source of traffic and IP address, so the advertising company can easily be identified. But it is not only the clicks and sales you have to track. When you start up a PPC campaign with a budget you possibly start with dozens of keywords to test them against each other. You have to find your best converting keywords, because your aim is not to get more clicks but to get more visitors. For example if your keywords are performing very badly for a long time Google is going to penalize you with setting your bids higher so your clicks will basically cost you more. If you are testing a new campaign, you are not likely to get an over 5% click rate I bet. But if you keep your finger on the pulse of the campaign you can make it much better. Google lets you see the click thru rate of all your keywords, so it is easy to resolve the problem. Here's what I do to eliminate the 80% I am wasting money on. (referring back to the beginning of the article). Every day I delete the 5-10 keywords that performed the worse, and replace them with new ones that are similar to the ones that performed the best. If you don't get the statistics from your search engine or advertising doesn't give you the details you need to rely on your tracking system. If you get search traffic, the keyword is going to be included in the link tracked.
I hope that I managed to stress the importance of tracking in Internet Marketing, I hope you can use the information I shared above.
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