Tracking Tricks

A surprising number of Internet marketers I speak to don’t have a clue when it comes to tracking their results. Many of them who analyze their logs still don’t use all of the easy tools at their disposal for keeping track of where their traffic is coming from.

If this is you, don’t feel bad. We’ve all been there.

Now, assuming that you are analyzing your logs and doing so with a tool that will tell you the path people travel through your site (if not - start now), then you are faced with these two tricky problems:

1. How do I track the effectiveness of my email campaigns? You’ll notice that a great number of hits to your site are “no referrer” traffic. That is, people that found your site either by reading an email or just typing in your URL.

2. Knowing that not all hits are equal (a visitor from one site may be more likely to buy than one from another) how do I know which hits are generating sales for me?

These two problems can both be solved using a simple tracking method that requires no scripting. The only tool you need is your log analysis tool which I hope you already have.

The first step to this technique capitalizes on two little known features of HTML:

Fact 1:

Whenever you add a ? to the end of a .htm or .html page, it has absolutely no effect on the page that gets called up. That is, if you were to write:

http://www.foreverweb.com/freesoftware.htm

or

http://www.foreverweb.com/freesoftware.htm?campaign1

The exact same page will come up. Go ahead and try it now. Pretty cool, right?

WARNING:

You have to append this “?” after the name of an HTML file. It won’t always work if you do it at the end of a domain name (unless your server supports it or you have special scripting - which is what we’re trying to avoid - you want something universal and easy, right?)

Fact 2:

Even though the same page is served when you do this, your server logs treat them as two different pages!

So, every time someone clicks on that special URL you will be able to know without question.

Now, how can you use this in your marketing?

A *great* many ways, but let me touch on some of the most important ones. By the time we’re done you’ll be on fire with new ideas for your marketing.

Here are a few to get you started:

1. Email

Remember how we talked about the problem of tracking email campaigns? This is the solution. You simply create a unique code for each email campaign you have (no, I don’t mean spam - I’m talking about legitimate OPT-IN marketing here) and then track the results in your log files. This will not just tell you how many clicks the campaign generated - it will also give you a good idea about how many people ordered as well. That is, you look at your report of “paths traveled through site” and pay attention to the path people took as a result of that particular campaign.

For example, if you see many instances of:

(The numbers show the order in which people viewed your pages - this is the “path traveled through site”.)

1. http://killertactics.com/index.htm?ad1

2. http://killertactics.com/page1.htm

3. https://killertactics.com/order.htm

And relatively fewer instances of:

1. http://killertactics.com/index.htm?ad2

2. http://killertactics.com/page1.htm

3. https://killertactics.com/order.htm

Then it is safe to assume ad1 is more effective than ad2, even if ad2 brought in more raw traffic.

Remember, not all hits are equal, right?

2. Banner Campaigns

The same principle applies here. Just give each campaign a unique code and you will be able to track the effectiveness exactly as you have above.

WARNING #2:

This is not a perfect system. You need to look at your actual number of orders and see if there is some congruence between your number of order page visits and your number of orders.

Also, there is a more effective way to track this. Simply get some referral partner tracking software and assign a different referral code to each campaign. Then you will no without question that the order came as a result of the campaign.

However, referral partner software can be difficult to set up if you’re not a CGI whiz and the best systems aren’t cheap.

What I’m offering you here is an inexpensive way to track your campaigns that only requires:

a. Your Imagination

b. A Log File Analysis Program

Can you think of some ways to immediately apply this technique to your marketing today? I challenge you to take the rest of the day refining your marketing effort using these techniques. You will be delighted at the new insights you are shown. I bet you will be surprised to find out which of your campaigns are winners.

Tip contributed by Mark Joyner,, of 1001 Killer Internet Marketing Tactics. Mark is also the CEO of Aesop Marketing Corporation.

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