You will have been said a hundred times that you need to track everything that is related to your marketing campaigns or you will fail. Yes, this is really important because otherwise, you won't know anything about the marketing success of each indivdual ad.

But What If You Decide For The Wrong Tracking Method ?

In order to be able to decide what tracking methods you can choose from, here's a short reminder :

1.) Using a tracking service like ROIbot, AdMinder or Hyper- tracker.

With this method, the original links are disguised with a link like

http://www.roibot.com/w.cgi?R45487_dhgtr .

If you click on such a link, you are automatically forwarded to the web site you have specified. You can see the number of clicks in your members' area of the tracking service.

2.) Setting up mirror pages/multiple autoreponders

Setting up multiple autoresponders for tracking e-mail responses e.g. report1@getresponse.com report2@getresponse.com report3@getresponse.com etc.

You can easily see, how many times each autoresponder has been hit and you can determine how successful each of your ad campaigns was.

Mirror pages are duplicates of your main pages. If you create different directories for your promotions, you will be able to see the results in your logfiles.

e.g. http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/promo1/

and in this directory you just have a copy of your index.html file. Or you can set up a redirect which leads immediately to your index.html without having to copy it into this new directory .

3.) The ? - method

This is a method that can be used for e-mails as well as for web sites. If you write an e-mail link, you can set the subject after the question mark. It would look like this :

mailto:abcd@host.com?subject=report1

The e-mail would would go to abcd@host.com and the subject line would automatically contain the subject "report1" without having it to enter manually. You will certainly have seen this many times already.

If you use this method with a web site, you can create a link like :

http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/chap1.htm?position6

and you will be able to track the hits by checking your logfiles (this is something that you should do at least once a week if you want to know how successful your web site really is) . The text following the question mark does not affect the page that is called.

Now Which Tracking Method Should You Choose ?

First of all, to be able to decide about this question, you need to know one important thing about search engines : They don't index dynamic pages. This means that pages which are created by using perl (cgi), php or asp are not indexed properly.

Most of the times there is database that delivers the results of some search requests. You can recognize dynamic pages by the question mark and by a repeating of the search terms in the URL or often the links contain several dozens of numbers and letters.

Examples would be :

http://www.domain.net/search.pl?Terms=business%20opportunities or http://www.domain.net/search.asp?chdr84j3339s042kfmdjhwww

The point is, of course there are many great tracking programs and web sites out there but using them in your article resource box doesn't give you a direct link back to your web site. Search engine spiders will not follow them through a cgi-script back to your site and will not even index pages that look like dynamic pages .

To make the last statement clear : Links to your main site but with a question mark won't improve your link popularity, either. So, one of my favourite methods for tracking results has become obsolete : http://www.website.com/?campaignname won't help me. But this is something I just recently discovered......

You Are Missing A Great Chance Of Increased Exposure

This means, you are missing a great chance to get more exposure at the seach engines as you cannot increase your link popularity . Many ezine publishers have an archive of their past issues at their web site and this would mean even further exposure at their web site directly AND indirectly by increased link popularity.

As a result, if you consider writing articles as a promotion me- thod for your Internet business, use your real domain name in your resource box and you will benefit from much better search engine rankings in the long run....

About the author: Article by Detlev Reimer. Feel free to use the article with these bylines included. Detlev has just finished creating his first product, a database program for Internet marketers which will help you to save and organize e.g. your advertising, customer and contact data. For further details, please visit : http://www.promobuddy.com/ . Sign up for his newsletter at http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/ .