There are so many different methods of advertising on the net that you can easily fill every minute of the day promoting your business without ever making a dime. You can spend all of your time and a bunch of money and still gain zero results.

The problem is complicated but everyone already knows. The biggest problem when it comes to finding the right programs for your advertising campaigns is that everywhere you turn someone’s telling you that they have the biggest, best and newest thing going. They all want your money or to add you to their down line or to place you in their affiliate program. Many of these marketers will say just about anything to get you to try their recommendation because their success depend on it. Sorting out what’s real and what’s just a waste of time can be very overwhelming to say the least. But you must have a system of tracking to see what’s working and what’s soaking up your time and money like a sponge.

The second biggest problem… Just as in traditional advertising what works great for one business may not bring in the same results for another. That’s why you can find an honest marketer that swears by a certain marketing method just to end up being another flop when it comes to your campaign.

Of course there are other factors such as ad copy, our targeted market and timing but the fact remains that we are just stumbling blindly destined to fail without a clear and effective way of tracking our advertising results. Without tracking, we have no idea when to try a new method or change our ad copy. What’s worse, we may have found the perfect fit and drop it without ever knowing that we stumbled on a gold mine. Time is priceless and ad tracking saves us time.

Ok, I know I tend to harp on things too long so let’s move onto solutions. First of all, I recommend we track everything. By that I mean we use a different tracking URL not only for every program but for each ad copy and every banner or html ad. One campaign can easily have dozens of tracking links. To keep things organized, I like to use a couple of very simple tools. First of all, I use notepad to record which URLs go with which program/campaign. I use notepad because it’s simple to use and it doesn’t tie up a bunch of my computer’s resources when I use it. The other tool I use is a small but powerful copy & paste tool called Flashpaste. I upgraded to Flashpaste Pro but I started with the free version and found it very helpful. I simply click ctrl/i and then scroll to the link or ad copy I want. I huge time saver.

One common way we see many online marketers tracking their links is by using a redirect through their own site. They look similar to this:
http://extremeezine.com/recommends/autopilot/index.html. The benefits are you can easily change the link should you drop a particular programs and it helps to hide the URL you’re promoting but only until the actual pages loads and then there’s your link. A big drawback with this system is that it would be a lot of work tracking everything with different URLs as I mentioned before. Another drawback is you still need to insert some way of recording the stats unless you want to rely on your server logs. I used the tracker http://4u2bn.com/a34 with the example link above. Some services allow you to insert a small line of JavaScript in the page’s html to record all types of stats. These are great but you still have the problem of limited URLs for your tracking program.

Another drawback to using the redirect ‘http://extremeezine.com/recommends/autopilot/index.html’ method is obvious. It can generate a very long URL just as affiliate programs do. That’s why I’m a big fan of programs such as YourAdTracker.com that combines link tracking with a short URL service. To get the same results that these services give you we would need to:
:: Set-up and upload a page for every link we want to track.
:: Set-up and include a tracking link or code.
:: Signup for a short URL for every link.
That’s easily two of three things to signup for and then we still need all that setup. So a third party link tracking with a short URL service is a no brainier.

Shortened URL Pros and Cons

The only con I can see with a shortened URL is that it doesn’t ‘describe or define‘ the link. As in the example above, http://extremeezine.com/recommends/autopilot/index.html tells you that I’m recommending AutoPilot whereas http://4u2bn.com/a34 doesn’t give a clue as to what you’re clicking on. This may be enough to prevent some people from clicking on the link. To help prevent this you need to be careful to fully explain the product/program in the ad copy and hopefully gain a little trust while doing it.

There’s no shortage in the Pros when it comes to shortening a URL…
:: It looks cleaner
:: You can easily change the like if it’s a membership service.
:: I won’t break in your emails causing wrapping problems so it’s much more reliable.
:: You can help conceal or cloak affiliate URL there by saving sales and/or credit.
:: It’s much easies to verbally tell someone the site address to go to.
:: It’s quicker and easier to type in the shortened URL.

I even shorten my own Blog links when writing my Ezine: http://extremeezine.com/track-your-ads-or-fail/ to http://4u2bn.com/a43
Wow, what a difference!

So track your ads or fail!
THAT’S RIGHT – I SAID IT,
Brian Hawkins