Easy as Pie Ad Tracking by Dee Brian

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Free Internet Marketing Lessons

Easy as Pie Ad Tracking

by Dee Brian

Successful advertisers know that you must have a system for tracking your ads. You must be able to easily and quickly determine which of your ads is producing results.

The easiest way I have found for tracking my ads is to create a gateway page with the name of my ad key. For example sa10.html is the gateway page for an ad in Scientific Advertising (sa) for January (1) 2000 (0). So in my ad the link looks like

<http://www.usedmice.com/ads/sa10.html>.

This gateway page redirects the visitor to my main page <http://www.usedmice.com/>. The gateway page uses a Meta tag that can redirect a visitor to another page or web site.

It looks like this:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="1;URL=http://usedmice.com">

Where the content is refreshed in 1 second and it is refreshed with the default page for usedmice.com.

In fact the whole program is 8 lines long. This is what it looks like.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Used Mice</TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="1;URL=http://usedmice.com">
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="FFFFFF">
</BODY>
</HTML>

I just save this document as sa10.html in my ad folder.

Then I am ready to place my ads. The beauty of this system is that it is automatically logged in your log or stats file. You don't have to do anything special for it to work, just upload the file to your server.

You can also use this even if your hosting company doesn't give you stats or logging files. All you have to do is just put a counter on the gateway page and visit that page to see how many have come through it. You might want to increase the refresh rate to 2 or 3 seconds to give you enough time to read your counter.

I also use this method for tracking my ads for affiliate programs. The visitor is redirected to the affiliate site.

Using this method will make it as easy as pie for you determine which of your advertisements are producing the results you need and which are not. I have a free PDF document that I use for tracking my ezine ads. You can download a copy for free at <http://www.usedmice.com/adtrack.pdf>.

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Dee Brian is the owner of Used Mice Web Hosting <http://usedmice.com/>. She works with people to set up and establish a presence on the web. She can be reached at mailto:dee@usedmice.com.
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