Promotion - Tracking Results

No matter what mixture of promotional activities you choose to do, it is really important that you understand what has worked for you - and what hasn't.

Even if it's a "free" activity - it has taken up some of your time, and that time is wasted if it hasn't produced results.

It's pretty well essential that you have some kind of a "tracking" system set up.

What's a Tracker?

Let me give you an example. All the hyper links in this guide actually point to links on my site with names like:

www.PracticalSelling.com/pdcb/0102/to.cgi?myss

When you click on a link you are taken to that location - the "to.cgi" Perl program running on my server. But only for a fraction of a second - just long enough for the tracker system to record your visit and then send you on to the right place on the web.

By using this system, I can see how many people have clicked on each link, and when. I can see the results of this guide being in circulation, quantify the results of my effort, calculate what has worked and what hasn't - inform my future decisions.

If I decide to place an e-zine ad, I can see how many clicks came from readers of that ad, in that issue of that e-zine. By setting up different trackers, I could see if different words in the same e-zine have different results.

How Do You Get a Tracker?

If you join the 5 Pillar Affiliate Program (and I suggest you should - it's free, and it's something you could use to extend your PDCB later ...) you get one for free. However, it's a Perl script, so you need to be using a web host with a cgi-bin (like Virtualis and be able to install and set up such a beast.

If you can't install your own scripts - or don't want the bother (who does?), link tracking is just one of the many modules included in ROIBot. You actually get the tracking facility in the free version - although it limits the number of campaigns and the number of clicks it will report on. It's enough to get you started though, and the beauty is you don't need to install anything to make it work.

The paid version gives you unlimited trackers that you can set up and use with no technical knowledge - along with a whole raft of essential site management and promotional tools.

Traffic Analysis

As well as knowing more about where people are clicking through to, there is a wealth of useful information available about how visitors get to your site and what they do when they get there.

HitBox can tell you things about your traffic like:

• Which pages visitors enter at.
• Which pages they leave your site from.
• The route they follow in between.
• How long they spend on site.
• Which site they linked to yours from.
• If they came from a search engine - what search terms they used.
• Which browser they are using, their screen resolution ...
• ... and much more.

It's essential information to understand the dynamics of your site and its visitors.

And it's free! Run - don't walk - to HitBox