Tracking Your Own Affiliate Ad Links

Affiliate programs come with built in tracking. Views or impressions, clicks and sales. Are the main tracking data supplied by most affiliate programs. This is all well and good, however you may find that you need more information.

If you have a large site there is no way of knowing what ads are on what pages using most in house tracking data. Advertisers are always updating and changing their ads. Some ads become obsolete, others have expiration dates, new ads are promoted and so on. Most advertisers at one time or another will require you to remove ads that have run their course. And the old ads on your site may stop working. Your almost always given an advance notice to change over ads. However if you have not tracked your ads by pages on your site, the job may be very time consuming.

Say you have 200 pages and you have just been pasting ad code on different pages. Some banners of different sizes, text ads and other advertiser program ads. Without keeping a record of what ads are on what pages, you now have to look at everyone of your 200 pages to check the ads for removal.

There are a couple of simple steps that will save you tons of time. And help you improve your sales. Write down every banner size you use for every advertiser. Write down the text ads you use and list the pages you place the ads under the banner size. This is for standard advertiser banners. Keep a separate record if you use special offer ads. This will also help with sales.

Most affiliate programs give you the banner number and or size that produced a sale. Knowing this and the pages displaying the ad, you can start to get and idea of the page content that works the best. You can devise systems to test ads by using different sizes and styles on different pages and tracking the data.

Most banner ads work better when used with text marketing. Placing text ads on top of, below or next to banners describing the benefits of the promotion attract users attention. The right text can greatly increase banner clicks.

M. Geller
Webmaster - Owner
FunwithyourPC