If you don’t have control of your business you will waste time and money. In the world of online marketing, it is essential that you track your advertising campaigns to know which ones are working and which aren’t.
You wouldn’t believe the number of people that promote their websites or affiliate links directly without using any type of tracking tools or tracking systems.
What is a tracking system?
A tracking system basically allows you to track your advertising by using a special tracking URL that redirects to the URL you’re promoting. The system will then inform you of the total received clicks, unique received clicks, conversion rates etc.
What are the conversion ratios?
A conversion ratio is the calculated percentage of users who have made a certain positive marketing action, such as buying a product or subscribing to a mailing list.
For sales purposes, tracking systems use your return on investment (ROI), which is a percentage that is calculated based on the investment and the benefits obtained to estimate the viability of a project. However, not all tracking systems come with this tool, so if you want to know about viability, try to find out if the system you are planning on using has it beforehand.
If, however, your only interest is to know the number of subscribers that are converted by a specific capture page, you would have to use a system that specifically calculates this percentage. In both cases, the implementation is similar.
Your tracking system will provide you with a code that you have to insert into your ‘thank-you’ pages. These pages are where you normally redirect your customers after a purchase to download the product or, in the case of systems to capture subscribers, the page where you thank them for their action and then give instructions on how to complete the process.
To use tracking system effectively, you will need to have access to and ownership of all of the pages you wish to track and an intermediate knowledge of HTML to make the necessary changes. Normally, if you dedicate yourself exclusively to promoting products or services as an affiliate, you will not be able to carry out advanced monitoring of your advertising because of the impossibility of modifying pages that are not under your ownership, unless the affiliate system you are using offers their own advanced tracking system. Here at ConvertingTeam, we offer a service that allows you to track sales as an affiliate when you use our platform.
If, however, you decide to use a third-party tracking tool to have more detailed statistics, there are currently a couple that stand out from the rest.
Voluum is one of the most popular affiliate tracking platforms around. It has tons of features, which make it one of the most complete platforms on the market.
Voluum doesn’t have a self-hosted platform service. It’s all about cloud-hosting. This approach allows for a focus on the cloud-hosted service and its features.
AdsBridge is one of the largest tracking systems on the market and provides a number of advantages in comparison with other trackers. It’s also one of the tracking systems preferred by larger players in the affiliate world. The platform also enables easy integration of variables with some of its “trusted partners” which allows you to set up your campaigns much faster, as you won’t need to process all of the parameters yourself.
Other honorable mentions include ThriveTracker, Prosper202, CPV Lab, FunnelFlux and iMobitrax. Remember, it’s always a good idea to take a look at some of the alternatives to see which one best suits your needs before committing to a service.
For more information and to join one of the fastest growing affiliate networks in the world visit us at ConvertingTeam