Dear Marlene, since many people have written about the technical side of tracking here, I'd like to share the "know-how" of tracking here.
You use tracking basically for three purposes:
1. to see how (and if) your advertising sources provide hits to your Gateways,
2. to find out how effective your campaigns are, and
3. to optimize your advertising cost (also in terms of time and effort).
You also use tracking to compare performance of your advertising campaigns. In my opinion it is best to start with ONE Gateway spread over a few advertising sources to begin with.
So let's imagine that you use your main Gateway in 3 advertising sources (be it a traffic exchange, a safelist or some kind of paid advertising, does not matter).
For Advertising Source 11, you add 1 as your key-code to the URL leading to your main Gateway (many affiliates have described how to do it) and promote this URL on Advertising Source 1 (AS1), then you add 22 to your main gateway URL and promote it on Advertising Source 2 (AS2), and you and 33 to your main gateway URL and promote it on Advertising Source 3 (AS3).
With these columns:
Day, AS1, AS2, AS3 where "day" is the day of the month, AS1 - AS2 are the names of your advertising sources. Make AS1 - AS3 span two columns, and under each enter "Hits" and "PSA", e.g.
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DAY | AS1 | AS2 | AS 3 |
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| Hits | PPSA| Hits | PSA | Hits | PSA |
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Every day, you go to your Power Tools > Hit Tracker and enter the numbers from there into the spreadsheet, so it is fine to make one for each month, and if you have PSAs on that day, you go to Genealogy and see the key code in the KC column for that PSA. You count the PSAs for each code and also enter them into the spreadsheet, e.g.
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DAY | AS1 | AS2 | AS 3 |
----------------------------------------
| Hits | PPSA| Hits | PSA | Hits | PSA |
---------------------------------------------
1 150 0 1300 0 459 1
2 342 0 3732 0 700 3
3 670 0 4324 1 1245 1
4 1098 0 7214 0 1790 1
5 1476 0 11543 1 2216 0
--------------------------------------------
This way you can clearly see, what is going on with your advertising. In this example: Advertising Source 1 is absolutely bad, not only low number of hits, but also no PSAs, Advertising Source 2 provides lots of hits, but only a trickle of PSAs, while Advertising Source 3 provides less hits than AS2, but those hits produce PSAs. So this should be the advertising source you should stay with. Later on, you can do the reverse, i.e. take one advertising source and TWO Gateways to see which one is more effective, and so on until you find both the best advertising source and the best converting (giving the largest number of PSAs per 1000 hits) Gateway. Still later on, you can add other columns, e.g. to show what percentage of newly recruited PSAs remain EA2 at least, especially if you use paid advertising sources.
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Dear Marlene, since many people have written about the technical side of tracking here, I'd like to share the "know-how" of tracking here.
You use tracking basically for three purposes:
1. to see how (and if) your advertising sources provide hits to your Gateways,
2. to find out how effective your campaigns are, and
3. to optimize your advertising cost (also in terms of time and effort).
You also use tracking to compare performance of your advertising
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