This applies whether it is banner advertising, small ads, newsletters or whatever. It is essential to understanding the most effective form of promotion for you.

A means of tracking your promotions so that you know exactly which banner or ad sends people to your site is needed.

There are several ways to do this, depending on your budget:

If you want a full blow commercial ad and affiliate tracking system then I would recommend you take a look at these two programs:

This is the service that is used by theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com

Naturally we recommend it. It has some unique features- it is extremely flexible and iyt is one of the very few that tracks up to 3 tiers.

It need no installation on your own website or PC and it is extremely affordable.

If you need an affiliate tracking package, check this one out.

Assoctrac

AdMinder is our de-facto ad tracking system. We use it daily and it is extremely informative. There is too much to say about it here, but we have made a feature of it on the products page click here to see (Opens in New Window)

By far the best way for the small -medium business is by using ROIbot.

ROIbot is part of an awesome suite of tools you can use on any web site.

The ROIbot Ad Tracker  will track the effectiveness of your ad campaigns or any link on the net.

We used it before we went over to AdMinder but still thoroughly recommend it. To see more details click here

"Now you can track the effectiveness of all your marketing efforts. It's far better than ad-tracking software costing $50 and up. And every bit as good as professional software costing as much as $17 per month. "

This is Free to 5 Pillar Affiliates... 

If you don't want to install AdMinder or ROIbot, you could try the do-it-yourself approach.

A simple way is to set up each ad in the form of an Affiliate link. For example, instead of having your sales link just to point to your site as in:

http://www.theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com/demo.htm

You would use a link like this:

http://www.theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com/demo.htm?camefrom=100&backto=document.url

Click on the link above - it does work!)

On the page where the link sends you to, you would extract the identifier of the particular sales link (in this case a number = 100) with a bit of JavaScript:

 

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

function WhereWasI() {

var handyString = window.location.search;

var startOfSource = handyString.indexOf("camefrom=");

if (startOfSource != -1) {

var endOfSource = handyString.indexOf("&",startOfSource + 9);

var result = handyString.substring(startOfSource + 9, endOfSource);

}

else

var result = "Source Unknown";

return result;

}

if (WhereWasI() != "Source Unknown")

document.write("Your Referring ID is: "+ WhereWasI() + " ")

else

document.write("Your Referring ID is: 100");

</SCRIPT>

This extracts the referring ID (in this case the number 100) and writes it to the page.

To track the link you would have to ask the prospect to copy the referring ID into a form, so that you can collect it. You can access this in several ways, for example to enter it into a form.

To see it in action again tracking the name of this web page - webtips -click on the following link:

http://www.theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com/demo.htm?camefrom=webtips2&backto=document.url

Another way is to use cgi scripts. We have not used this on our site, but here is a description if you want to try it. click here

If this is too simple, you could try a simple affiliate program, such as http://www.simpleaffiliate.com/index.cgi?1428