How to Track Your Online Advertising

By Matt McKinney

If you are a small business owner then chances are that you want to know how every penny of your online advertising budget is being spent. Here are some tools which you can put to use tonight so that you can begin to track your advertising dollars.

Using comprehensive online marketing and advertising tracking tools will help you gain greater control over your advertising dollars. You quickly can determine what is (or is not) working when it comes to your advertising budget, and you will be able to make decisions that much more quickly.

The beauty of online advertising tracking tools is that they are usually free with any registration, comprehensive, and can quantify how well a particular advertising campaign is working. Some even allow for split testing to help you further refine your advertising efforts.

If you like writing useful, short how-to articles, consider submitting them through major online article directories like ezinearticles.com. The benefits are that it is free to submit your articles in the regular manner, have to meet minimum standards so Google and other search engines respect the content, and the directories track the number of clicks on your links as well as the number of views your article received. In addition, it has a built-in "viral marketing" component which expands the reach of your content for no charge.

Online video sharing sites benefit small business owners as well. They do not charge you to post content, they allow you to test different keyword phrases in the title/tag/description fields, and they display the number of views your video has received. In addition, third party services (free and paid) can submit your video to several video sharing sites at once; and these services often offer you comprehensive tracking of all of your videos from one location.

Finally, Google Analytics is a free service which has comprehensive tracking features. It integrates with Google's AdWords program, and it works with Google's Optimizer program. The latter allows you to split-test landing pages to determine what converts best for your advertising budget. You even can track visitor-to-customer conversions or other "goals" as determined by Google Analytics.

Combined with any pre-existing statistics package offered by your web hosting company, these tools will help you track your advertising dollars. You can get feedback quickly, prepare internal and external reports, and have solid data on which you can base future advertising decisions. Consider adding some of these tools and watch your control over your advertising budget allocation increase significantly.

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