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Articles Index >> Marketing
Why Tracking Is Crucial To Your Online Profits
by Michael Cheney
A lot of people that have websites on the Internet are leaving money on the
table. You might be one of them. Right now you might be losing out big time
on profits you could be having from your website because you are not tracking.
A lot of people, when they hear the word ‘tracking’, start to panic
and think that it involves a mathematical formula or that it is something complex
and time consuming. All tracking means is keeping track of how your various
campaigns and online marketing efforts are working.
You should never launch an online advertising campaign without tracking its
effectiveness. What this means is that you should track the effectiveness of
each headline you use within that campaign. You should track how effective the
copy is at generating clicks. And, more importantly, you need to track how many
people that actually click on your ad go through, visit your website and buy.
Unless you are tracking and testing each element of your advertising campaign,
you have no way of knowing which elements are working better than others. You
would effectively be running your advertising blind.
Despite the fact that many online marketing experts like John Reese, Corey
Rudl and others are vouching for the fact that tracking has been responsible
for their large earnings, too many webmasters are ignoring this advice and simply
casting their advertising funds to the winds. To be certain that you are not
wasting money online, you need to track effectively.
This means, at worst, just keeping a simple spreadsheet of all your advertising
campaigns. All you need to do is take a note of how much each campaign has cost,
when it started, what traffic you have gotten as a result of it, and how many
sales you’ve made. If a publication is offering you advertising and they
can’t give you this type of information, they are often best avoided.
All of us, I’m sure, have fallen into the trap of simply throwing money
at an advertising campaign in the blind hope that it’s going to generate
in clicks, traffic and new business. Often, as we’ve all learned to our
cost, this doesn’t always work.
A great way to track campaigns is to send people to different web addresses.
You could have a URL that is particular to one campaign and another URL that
is particular to another campaign. In this way you can simply track using website
statistics packages, like WebTrends or ClickTracks,
to actually see which ad campaign has been most effective.
It doesn’t have to be rocket science when you’re testing and tracking
your various advertising and online marketing activities. To start at a basic
level you can do it manually. You don’t even need to do it electronically.
What you’ll find is if you launch more online marketing initiatives,
start to advertise in e-zines, promote your products and services through pay
per click, search engines and other directories, you’ll soon realize you
need some type of automated software to help you track all of your campaigns.
These types of software not only show you who is coming into the website, where
they’ve come from, and how effective your advertising is. They can also
show you the exit traffic from your website, which links on your website are
being clicked on most often, and how many times are people clicking on specific
ads from your site into other people’s sites.
This is all crucial information which you need to get your hands on in order
to make more profits from your website.
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