I wanted to breakdown for you what Ad Tracking is in a way that might help take some of the mystery out of it.

While having a conversation with a buddy of mine TheNightOwl from the Warrior Forum…  I was describing to him what Ad Tracking is in a much simpler form.  He got it.  He told me I should put this information out, so here it is.  I hope it helps you out.  Thanks NightOwl.

When you’re Ad Tracking you’re tracking a device (computer, smart phone, etc.) on a network, in this case the Internet via an IP address and every device represents a real live person.  Now don’t get all freaked out or anything, it’s not illegal or bad in anyway.  You’re not stalking people or anything weird like that.  You’re simply capturing information that the Internet needs to operate anyway and putting it into a usable format to make better marketing decisions.  Look at it as a way for you to better take care of your customers while you grow your business.

We can break it down further and simplify it even more.  In its simplest form you can add a unique identifier to your links.  This will allow you to know which links are working and which one’s aren’t.  You can use these links for articles, classified ads, pretty much any marketing where you leave a link for your customers to click and find your website.  What’s really cool about this is the simplicity.  You need to understand the concept of adding unique identifiers to your links.  It’s the basis for tracking your advertising on the Internet.  I’m going to share with you some code that you can use today to help you track your links.

So let’s get down to brass tacks.  There are several ways you can track your marketing efforts.  The most common way is by creating tracking links.  This can be done manually or with Ad Tracking software.  Let’s say you’re doing some affiliate marketing and using articles to get targeted visitors for instance.  To manually track each article you can create your landing page links with a variable added to each one so you know exactly which article is not only sending you targeted visitors, but more importantly which articles are actually producing sales.

This is where the rubber meets the road…

You’ll need to add a variable to your landing page links that you put in the resource box of your article.  Your links would look like this:

yoursite.com/landingpage.php?a=eza1 (Ezine Articles article 1 for instance)

In this case the variable ‘a’ is added to your links and the value is ‘eza1′.  Now you can add a different value for each article like ‘eza2′, ‘eza3′, etc.  If you do different article directories, then create a different value for each directory.  The key is to make sure that each value you add is unique so you know what’s working and what’s not.  You’ll want to create your values in a way that at a glance you know the source of each one and probably keep a spread sheet or mind map or something that tells you what every code means in case you forget later.

Once you add the variables to your links you’ll need to capture the variable on your landing page and add it to your affiliate links.

On the very top of your landing page HTML code you put:

<?php
$page = $_GET['a'];
?>

Now this will grab what ever value you have for the variable ‘a’ and store it for later use.  The beauty of this is that you can automate much of your tracking this way.  The only manual process is creating your tracking links, which is nothing more than adding a unique value to the variable for each one.

The final piece of this equation is to add the variable to your affiliate links.  Most Affiliate Network’s have a built in tracking capability.  In the case of Clickbank it’s the TID value, Tracking Identifier.  So your links would look like this:

yourhoplink.com/?tid=<?php echo “$page”; ?>

This is basic tracking that is easily implemented for any links in which you want to track.  Pretty cool…

What if you’re using HTML pages and not PHP pages?  No problem there.  What you do is add an .htaccess file to the root of your domain.  Open up a text editor like notepad and paste the following code into it:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html

Then save it as .htaccess and upload it to the root of your server where the root is usually public_html.  You might have to rename it and take the .txt off of it once you get it on your server if you’re using notepad.  Make sure you test everything before you implement your tracking.

I hope you got the basics of what we’re doing here.  This is Ad Tracking in its simplest form, as well as the basis for more sophisticated tracking via software.  By creating unique variable values for each tracking link you now can easily figure out what’s working and what’s not.

While this is not a perfect Ad Tracking solution it will certainly get the job done and is an easy and free way to get started.  In the next installment we’ll look at how to track your PPC advertising.

Well go over using this technique with PPC as well as a more in-depth look at Ad Tracking software and how it automates most of these tasks.

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