*** File under Ad Tracking - click for details. What was the first product you bought when you started your Internet Marketing activities? Mine was an Ad Tracking service. When I started learning about Internet Marketing, a gem of advice that I kept hearing was "test everything!" I can best summarise that advice as: "Adopt a testing mentality". I decided that, once I had a business up and running, I would follow that advice. It seemed to me that it was not relevant to me at that time. Then - when I began thinking about taking some action to promote various 'business opportunities' the wisdom of the "testing mentality" advice struck home... Any form of promotion was either going to cost me money, or time - or both. And in common with every early-stage marketer, I had a severe shortage of both! So - I was keenly interested to know how well each promotional campaign that I was planning was going to be working. The result was that my first significant expenditure as an Internet Marketer was on an Ad Tracking service. The best I could find. I realised that ad tracking was relevant to me right from the start, not later on. This cost me $19.95 per month, which was a LOT to spend for a newbie. But I figured I could easily save that much, and a probably a lot more, by knowing which of my promotional activities was working and which not. So - whether you're new to IM or an established player, access to a first-class Ad Tracking capability is an essential part of your toolset. Unless you have time and money to waste! Look at it this way:
  • The worst form of disorganization is spending money (or time) and getting nothing in return. Unless you track the results of your promotions, you're likely to end up doing exactly that.
  • Almost as bad is NOT spending money when you can get a very good return. Good Ad Tracking will tell you where to keep spending money, as well as where to stop.
And if you're still unsure about the need for ad tracking (or more generally, link tracking), here's another way to think about it. As Internet Marketers, what are we all about? What do we spend all our efforts trying to get people to do? It all boils down to getting people to click on links! That's the beginning and the end of it. Looked at in this way, the 'workings' of your business is just clicks on links. So if you want to know what's going on in your business, you HAVE to know WHO is clicking on WHAT links. I hope this makes it very clear that ad tracking (or link tracking, if you will) is -or should be - at the very heart of your business. No question about it. However, ad tracking technology allows you to do a lot more than just track ads. It also allows you to do URL Cloaking, Split Testing, Keyword Tracking, Action Tracking... There's actually quite a lot to it. Probably the best guide to explaining all about ad tracking is Harvey Segal's free report The Ad Tracking Guide. Harvey does a superb job of explaining the full range of what you can do with ad tracking and also covers the differences between ad tracking services and software. Go and download it now - it's free, remember - and if you're not doing ad tracking (and link tracking), you are losing money: no question about it. *** File under Ad Tracking - click for details.