If You Read One Article About Tracking Read This One

What do think is one of the biggest nemesis Marketers have in their business? You guest it… ” Tracking.” Just think about it for a minute, without tracking how can you tell what’s really working? What’s costing you money? Or better yet, when to scale a campaign?

I have to admit, I didn’t start seeing a positive ROI in my business until I started tracking all my campaigns. It is absolutely amazing what you can track with the right platform. For example, ever wondered which of your keywords were capturing opt-ins on a CPA offer? Did you even know you could track the actions of your leads as they pass through your sales funnel?

By The Numbers

Fact, some of the most successful Marketers built assets for their business by purchasing solo ads. Fact #2, you can not purchase solo ads… or even sale solo ads without some kind of tracking system capable of distinguishing clicks. As a solo ad buyer you only get charged for unique clicks.

So it’s imperative to know from the 300 clicks ordered how many of them were unique. I once had to contact a solo ad provider to let him know I was owed 40 unique clicks. In short, based on the total clicks I received… it appeared that my order was complete; however my tracking system told me otherwise, and thus I was awarded 40+ unique clicks from my provider. Honestly, without ClickMagick there was really no other way for me to catch that.

How It Works

Before we begin let me be candid here, it would be absolutely ludicrous to start a paid ad campaign without any kind of tracking in place. As I eluded to earlier in the article, part of having a success campaign is the ability to scale. Without knowing which keywords are generating clicks, leads, and sales there’s no way to effectively scale a campaign without losing money.

Once you create a landing page around an offer, you’ll want to create a basic tracking URL as your destination link. When you create your tracking URL, make sure to include a Link Name (though it is optional, it will help to identify your campaigns), name your Tracking Link (this will become your Tracking URL to promote your landing page) and a Primary URL (this is your landing page where you’re sending traffic). Cloaking a Link is an optional feature not required for creating a tracking link.

Here’s the important part. Once you create your landing page and your tracking URL, you’ll need to actually use your tracking URL in your campaign.

If you’re running an email marketing campaign , you’ll want to use your new tracking URL in your links, behind your calls-to-action.

If you have a call-to-action in your email like, “Download My Free FB Retargeting Ebook,” you’ll want to make sure you use your tracking URL as your hyperlink.

If you’re running a PPC campaign , you’ll want to make sure to use your tracking URL in the ” Destination URL ” (see the example from Google AdWords below).

Checking Your Analytics

Now here’s the best part… now that you’ve done the hard work of creating a Landing page and a Tracking URL for that landing page, you can check the analytics from your tracking platform for visits from that specific URL. In the example below you will find analytics from a solo ad I purchased for 100 clicks:

Total Clicks – 151

Unique Clicks – 149

Filtered Clicks – 19

Actions (Opt-ins) – 59

Average Clickthrough Rate – 39.6%

With Clickmagick you can also go a step a further and analyze the quality of clicks (e.g., tier 1, tier 2, tier 3) and mobile clicks:

Conclusion

That’s pretty much the basics of tracking URL’s; however as you can see there is so much more you can do (depending on your tracking platform). The point is… it doesn’t matter what system you use but you need tracking in your business – without it you have no direction.

I used Clickmagick in my examples simply because it’s the current tracking system I use in my business, and as you can see it’s a very comprehensive tracking system that has worked really well for my business. You can get more information on ClickMagick by clicking here.

For those of you who are already tracking URL’s tell us about your experience by commenting below.