Cool Tip For Tracking Click-Throughs
By Anna Johnson on October 2nd, 2008Do you run pay-per-click ads in the search engines… or run ads in different ezines, email newsletters or on other marketers’ websites or autoresponder series? Do you have – or want to have – just ONE landing page for the traffic from ALL those ads… but still be able to track the click-throughs from each of those ads?
Well, instead of creating mirror pages of the same landing page (which can be painful) just do this: add a ‘tracking code’ to the end of the destination URL in your ad.
Your tracking code should begin with a question mark i.e. ‘?’ and end in whatever word or code is meaningful for you.
For example, if I was running an ad directing people to the Kikabink News advertising page I might add the following tracking code at the end of the URL:
?knsept08
‘knsept08′ is simply a made-up code to help me identify traffic that derived from the ad in question. I would add this to the destination URL in my ad as follows:
http://www.kikabink.com/news/advertise-with-us/?knsept08
So my ad might read:
Have a product or service aimed at Internet marketers? Advertise it in the Kikabink News email newsletter and reach a growing audience of passionate, entrepreneurial Internet marketers eager for ways to improve their marketing results. Click here to find out how: http://www.kikabink.com/news/advertise-with-us/?knsept08
Now, if people click on that link:
- They will end up on the right landing page and
- I will be able to check my web analytics to see how many people clicked on this particular URL, giving me an indication of the effectiveness of the ad.
Nifty, huh?
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:05 am
Great tip, something that I’ve often forgotten about. You can these easily set up goals in Google analytics that track the exact url (with the given parameters (?wordhere). Thank you!
Karen