Chapter 2: Getting Traffic to Your Website 

Section 4: How To Track and Test Your Ads, Website Traffic, and Everything

There are five main programs I am going to discuss here that you will be using to track everything that you are doing. Three are free, and two are paid programs that are very useful.

Let me briefly describe each one, then we will look at each one in more detail in the video below.

First off, I use keyword radar to track actual sales of products to the keyword. This information is absolutely CRITICAL for your success long-term. This doesn’t work with every program, but it does work with many, and is easy to implement. This is a one-time paid program ($97). If you sell any products through clickbank, which I will discuss in the next section, this works GREAT with that, and many other popular affiliate programs.

Second is a membership program called hypertracker ($20/mo) that is the industry standard. This helps to give a compare between the results from the other tools, and hypertracker is very easy to use and integrate with any activity, not just PPC. The more data you have (in easy to use form) the better.

You can get a free 14 day trial to test it out and see if you like it. When you expand into e-zine ads and other e-mail advertising, which I discuss at my website, you will want to have a tool like this.

Thirdly, you should be using a free tool from google imbedded within your Adwords account whenever you can. This is called “conversions” and allows you to track things like opt-ins and sales. You need to control the webpage in order to use this, because you need to paste in a small amount of html coding into the page that people are referred to after performing the action you want to measure.

You can generally use this to track opt-ins, but cannot track sales unless you are selling your own product. You should still use this to track opt-ins, and use keyword radar when you are selling other people’s products.

Fourth is free tracking that is provided with some affiliate programs. For an example, I walk you through the tracking included with Mike Dillard’s Magnetic Sponsoring affiliate program, which I HIGHLY recommend. Unfortunately, because of how the tracking ids are provided (assigned rather than allowing you to choose them) keyword radar cannot be used. Google’s conversions and hypertracker also cannot be used because you don’t control the sales page.

In this case, you just need to manually assign the tracking ids provided in your ads. I would do this by keyword group rather than individual keywords, to save time.

Lastly, I use google analytics to track website visitors. That is a free tool to use, has great reports and summaries that are easy to use, and doesn’t interfer with adwords.

Now that you have successfully used a pay per click campaign with Google’s Adwords and are successfully testing and tracking everything, let’s learn how to kick it up a notch. The next thing to learn is how to scale up your results using e-zine advertisements …