Without tracking, your online advertising is just a shot in the dark. Many new and seasoned marketing individuals spend significant dollars on Pay-per-click (PPC) banner advertisements, ezline ads, and other online media but do not know which ads have brought them the greatest success.

You know that you should be tracking all of your online ad buys, but are you? Do you understand your numbers and what you should do with them? Are you refining your email and online marketing efforts accordingly?

It is important to track all of your online advertisement, even if your ad provider is showing you your results. You need to employ your own tracking to double-check.

Types of online marketing avenues that you should be monitoring:

Site links
. PPC
Articles
Ezine advertisement
Banner ads
Signatures Tag
Forum postings
Email marketing promotions
Free Classified listings
Paid Classified listings
Surveys
Auto responder
Reciprocal link

Statistics that you should be concerned with:

Open-rate - Particularily important in email marketing. This statisitic will tell you how many people opened your email marketing message. This number should be used as a estimate to measure trends and not an absolute number. Many variables can effect the accuracy of this count. For example, an open rate cannot be used in a text message, so if your message is being displayed and opened in text, the count will not increment. As well this count will be incremented if Outlook clients are displaying the preview pane. If a client shows the message in a preview pane and then clicks to open, you will get a count of two.

Click-through - A count of how many people clicked on a particular link in an email or on a text or banner link on a website. Ensure that your tracking software or service shows both clicks and unique clicks. The number you should be most concerned with is unique clicks. You do not want to be billed for someone who clicks on a particular ad 30 times in one minute.

Sales or actions count - Most tracking systems offer the ability to place code on your sales confirmation page and tie this to a tracking link. This count will tell you which online ad resulted in a sale.

Sale details - Some tracking systems allow you to add specific details about the sale to the tracking result. This usually requires you to be able to add code to the server side code of your website.

How do I get these statistics?

You will need to employee a speciallized tracking link for all of your email marketing and online marketing efforts. Many advertising options will provide you with these statistics, as well PPC engines like Overture and Google will provide you with click counts. It is important as well, to employ your own tracking to get the results from advertising that does not provide you with stats, as well as double-checking the results from those that do.

There are two main types of tracking systems. One, a service that is web-based that allows you to manage your tracking without the need for servers, or software downloads. Two, software that you would need to employ and manage on your server.

Service options -
ezTrackZ http://www.eztrackz.com
Hypertracker http://www.hypertracker.com
Adminder http://www.adminder.com

Software options -
AdtrackZ - http://www.adtrackz.com
Dynatracker - http://www.dynatracker.com

What your statistics tell you:

. Which ad copy had the most clicks and lead to the largest

number of actions or sales?

. How many people opened your email messages. Should you

resend?

. Who opened your email message. Should you resend to those

that did not, or send a follow-up to those that did.

. What faired better, banners or text links?

. Did you PPC advertising count and bill match your tracking

results?

. Did your online ad result in a positive Return on Investment?

Gathering statistics is just a start. Now that you have this data you will be able to make decisions and refinements to your email and online marketing.

Take this information and change your marketing accordingly and you will find that you often can save hundreds if not thousands of dollars monthly.