Tracking the results

One of the greatest benefits of online advertising is the opportunity to track results. Using a dynamic website to track source and conversion ratios makes it easy to track success and optimize your strategies. Even keeping track of the banner types is easier. Experimenting can also deliver surprising results and can be tracked easily.

Over the years it has become clear that in the online marketing industry mostly focus on the amount of clicks they received from the advertising campaigns to measure their success. Recently it has become more and more complex as it became evident that there are more factors involved than just clicks.

Tracking click through rates is crucial in order to ensure your advertising campaign is successful. tracking can be done in several ways. You can use a service provider like double click or you can even use a simple process whereby you ad a query string to the URL and then analyze the specific query string from your log files.

Many web site owners use a redirect page within their own site and then count the hits on the page from which it is redirected. Others simply look at the amount of referals from the advertising site. This can be problematic though, as there i no indication on how good traffic are converting.

For the purpose of monitoring the true success and tracking results properly you need to know how many of the clicks received actually converts. You can even go as far as to track how much profit has been made. Please read my ebook on Designing a portal site for more details.