Why Is Link Tracking So Important?
When you have an online business and you’re promoting several links, you will need to know how effective your capture pages, adverts and other promotional links are. Link tracking is a very important resource to help you to find out where you get the best results and which the best advert you have out there is. When you know these results you can adjust those that are not working too well to get better results from them and widen the use of the most effective ones to obtain more from them.
How To Effectively Use Link Tracking
When you set up a means to track your links, you need to see which of your ads, solo ad emails or anything you have out there is getting clicks on those links. Each link will be a different tracking link even though it may be going to the same page. The important thing is which ad is working best and the reason why EVERY ad has a unique tracking link.
Your results are easier to monitor when you have proper tracking set up for your ads. If you have several capture pages for a particular offer it’s a good idea to set up tracking links from those as well so you can tell which ones are converting best. This type of tracking is called a split test and is something you need to learn about when your business grows and has more and more capture pages and offers. Some autoresponder services will allow you to do this by installing a code into your site.
Remember to track your links from whatever source you put them. If you use a free ad source, you can use one tracking link for each email you use based on the campaign because you can still check your results in your tracker.
How To Set Up Link Tracking
Link tracking is pretty simple to set up. I use a system that suits me and it’s free for those who want to start getting used to tracking links, but there are some restrictions when you use a free account. The upgrades are useful and are not expensive. You may want to look at a more advanced system when you move forward, but the one I use has been good for me. You can find out more about that system here.
Google analytics can be used for some tracking, but because of some changes it’s usually only effective if you use Adwords. Another useful tool if you have a blog is a free plug in called Pretty Link, which will tell you how many visits you’ve had to that page, but is very basic and doesn’t tell you where your visitor came from.
Setting up your campaign is easy. According to which system you use, the general method is to go to a link that usually shows campaign and choose new campaign. You will be required to put a description of your campaign.
That being completed, you will have to put in the target url address, which if it’s your capture page, then use that one. If it’s an external capture page which may be given to you when you start up you enter your own url for that page.
If you don’t want to use cloaking or any other service offered, you should be able to create the tracking link. When your unique tracking link is created, you need to copy it and put it safe (I suggest a spreadsheet so you can reuse the link whenever you want) and then use that tracking link in your solo ad emails or other advertising that is relevant to your campaign.
Don’t forget to have different links for different sources so you know where the most effective results come from. That’s it!
With link tracking, you can monitor the progress of your campaigns, even when advertising offline. If you have several ads that point to a capture page, or several pages, this tool is a must for any online marketing activity.
To the future,
Barrie Evans
This is a great post Barrie and have always heard that you should use tracking but I am lost when it comes to sorting it !! It probably is easy but always sounds so difficult ! Thanks for sharing and will try and figure it out…..
I didn’t think it was that complicated, but I didn’t put THAT much importance on it. How wrong I was! The system I use is very easy, but you need to make it a bit of a ritual so you can get into it and do it as a matter of course.
Another informative post Barrie.
I too am like Merle, heard of tracking but a little lost in translation.
Will try to follow what you have included in this content to see if I can learn how to track – and I wasn’t aware there was tracking on Pretty Link either so will definitely look at that too.
If you look at Pretty link it shows how many visits you have to that link and how many are unique. It’s extremely basic, but you can use it in such a way that you know where the clicks came from because you set up the link for a particular ad if that makes sense.