Tracking Your Campaigns

The importance of tracking all of your campaigns should never be underestimated. The information that can be gleaned about your website visitor when you use tracking effectively can increase your sales dramatically and quickly so let’s look at why.

The success of any marketing campaign really depends on the ability for you to be able to quantify the traffic hitting your website and what that traffic is doing once they arrive at your site.

Again it’s like the 80/20 rule in that as a rule of thumb 20% of traffic will provide sales for you but the question is - how do you know which 20% of that traffic is actually providing sales and where exactly is that traffic coming?

If you don’t know this vital information then it is highly likely that you are abandoning campaigns that are losing money for you when in fact they may not be losing campaigns at all but may just have keywords that are not performing well but just eating into your profits instead.

Imagine if you could look at your website traffic – see exactly which keywords are making sales for you and ditch the 80% of keywords that are not making sales – that could very easily turn a losing campaign into a profitable one – but you’ll never be able to do this with your campaigns unless you can measure your traffic and the absolute only way to do this is via tracking.

Imagine being able to track the behaviour of visitors to your site.  Are they all leaving at the same point,  are they clicking through to the vendors page of the product you are promoting and then leaving or are they not even clicking through to the vendors page? 

If you know this information then you will be able to improve your campaign performance.  The truth is that you can’t fix something unless you know it isn’t working and unless you have tracking in place it’s impossible to understand and be able to analyze the behaviour of visitors to your site.

However, the problem with tracking is that it’s boring and thousands of affiliates don’t bother to do it. Even some of the so-called ‘gurus’ don’t do it. It doesn’t matter whether you are just starting out, or at an intermediate stage or a super affiliate – if you are not tracking your campaigns you are most definitely losing money. And whilst it may be a little boring once you have it in place it is easy to maintain.

Imagine how much easier your campaign management would be if you could easily access this information and focus your time on money on exactly what is working and improve on that - fixing the aspects of your campaign that you KNOW for sure  are not working (because you are tracking!)

Like it or not, tracking is one of the most complicated, but most important tasks you have as an affiliate marketer because in today’s market, it’s crucial for every affiliate to track keyword response rates in order to maximise profits.

In short, knowing this information about your traffic lets you know exactly where your site is in the market and gets you one step closer to where you want to be.

If you’re just getting started with tracking there is no need to buy expensive tracking software as most hosting packages come with features that will allow you to track visitors to your site, where they are coming from and how they behave on your site.

So take the time to check your hosting package and see what these stats are telling you about your website visitors as your starting point in tracking your campaigns.

Once you are armed with this information you can then decide if you need to up your campaign tracking methods by buying more sophisticated software to track your campaigns.