If you've browsed some of the pages of this site, in particular the "Website promotion" section, you'll have noticed how we strongly advise anyone to monitor the clickthrough rates of any promotional effort. The motto is: "Track absolutely everything!"

It's common mistake to want to monitor advertising results by means of the dollar bottom line only, because sales revenue is never generated from one single source. If you've followed the guidelines of this site on how to develop your Business and not just your Website, you may already be receiving low cost, high converting Search Engine traffic. But if you're like most Business owners, you'll want to increase sales revenue and optimise ROI, by means of additional, paid traffic. And you won't limit yourself to just one or a few ads: a Pay per Click or keywords ad campaign alone can easily run into hundreds, sometimes thousands of ads. Add to your advertising mix some banner ads, ezine and email ads, your own newsletter and perhaps other Website promotion resources and you can see the potential for "loosing track" of what works and what doesn't.

Only tracking each and every campaign will allow you to build on those campaigns that work, ditch those that don't and calculate ROI of your advertising expenditure.

The principle of tracking ads is really quite simple. Suppose your site is all about coffee and it's called www.thecoffeegeeks.com. Now, suppose by way of example that you're promoting the site in a niche ezine. Instead of advertising the site URL, you advertise a tracker URL, for example www.thecoffeegeeks.com/campaignname, where campaignname is a name or number (or combination thereof) identifying this particular advertising effort. Next the campaign is executed and the ezine ads are sent out. Your link tracker software (also referred to as ad tracker software or url tracker) will register all clicks the campaign has generated. Simply divide the cost of the ad by the number of clicks it generated and you have the Cost per Click (CPC) of this particular campaign!

But there is far more that ad tracking software can do for you. Calculating the CPC is an important aspect of establishing the profitability (ROI) of an ad campaign. But to get the complete picture you need also to monitor the conversion rate of the campaign. This is done by inserting a tracking pixel on the "Thank you" page of the site that takes the order and processes the payment. By measuring (exactly and precisely) how many sales an ad campaign has generated, you'll be able to calculate the exact gross profit (sales revenue - cost of sales) of the campaign).

One important aspect of optimising an ad campaign is the ad copy: the classified ad, sales letter, type of banner etc used has a tremendous effect on both the clickthrough rate and the conversion rate. But how do you figure out what sales copy works and which doesn't? There is a simple method: use so-called "split testing". By means of split testing the same amounts of traffic are sent to two sales letters at the same time and conversion rates are measured separately. It will become immediately clear which of the two sales letters pulls in the most sales!

Monitoring hundreds (if not more) campaigns at the same time may sound like hard work but using sub campaigns makes everything much easier. A good example would be an AdWords keyword campaign. Create a main tracker URL, for example www.thecoffeegeeks.com/adwords. Now, create sub campaigns that correspond to each keyword you're bidding on: www.thecoffeegeeks/adwords_coffee, www.thecoffegeeks/adwords_purejava and so forth. The link tracker will show you the overall results of the campaign at a glance. One more click will show the results keyword by keyword. The principle of organising your tracker URLs into sub campaign is used wherever you're running multiple, related ads, thereby reducing your workload tremendously.