Using Tracking Links

By: Detlev Reimar | Posted: 29th December 2004

Why Using Tracking Links In Article Resource Boxes Can Block Your Link
Popularity

© 2002 by Detlev Reimer

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

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 :

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 :

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 :

or

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 : 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

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Written by Detlev Reimer, CEO of 1A IMS-Marketing. In his Web Money Marketing Newsletter, he shows regular people how to earn an income online. Subscribe to the free version by sending a blank email to: webmoney @ dreimer.par32.com (Remove spaces) or visit his website at: http://www.internetmarketing-success.com .
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http://www.internetmarketing-success.com

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Tags: e mail, link popularity, article resource, marketing campaigns, question mark, autoresponder, autoresponders, boxes, reminder, subject line, hundred times, members area, ad campaigns, mirror