Network Marketing – The Importance Of Proper Ad Tracking

In order to survive, every network marketing business needs customers. Now while a common theme in network marketing is to go after your family and friends, at some point, you will expand your efforts into other areas of marketing. With the endless number of ways you may market a product, you’re biggest question is which of your marketing methods is the most effective. This is where ad tracking comes into play. If you’re not tracking, you’ll never know which method is the best use of your marketing dollars. In fact, without proper tracking, you may end up blowing your entire marketing budget on the wrong advertising and quickly be out of your network marketing business.

Why Track?

The purpose of ad tracking is to provide some measure as to the effectiveness of each type of marketing you’re doing for your network marketing business. Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re running a classified newspaper ad in three papers, leaving magazines featuring your business in office lobbies, and running several internet ads. Each type of advertising has a different cost. You’re phone starts ringing with people responding to your ads. The question is, which ad are they responding to? If you don’t know, you won’t know which ad is the most effective use of your marketing dollars, hence you won’t know if you need to do another round of newspaper ads, order more magazines or crank up your web ads.

How To Track

There are many different ways to track the effectiveness of your advertising. Most network marketing advertising today, whether online (directly on the internet), or offline (e.g. , newspapers, magazines, etc.) usually directs prospects to a website URL (address) for more information. The best way to track a URL is to use a tracking code for each different ad or source where you place your ads. In other words, you would use one code for each different offline and online method. These codes would either come from your company’s tracking system, or from 3rd party software based systems. The software tracking would tell you how many times a person clicked on each of the different URLs telling you which was the most effective in turn telling you which form of advertising is producing the most volume. Now a quick caution here. Just because you’re getting a lot of click-thrus doesn’t mean you ad is effective. You must also analyze if those people clicking on your ads are buying your product. If you get 100 clicks on one ad and it generates you 1 sale (1% effective), that ad isn’t as effective as one that generated 10 clicks and produced 5 sales (50% effective).

Where to find tracking programs

There are two primary places to find programs for tracking the effectiveness of your network marketing advertising efforts. A simple search on the Internet will yield results for many ad tracking programs. You’re looking for programs that are web based, not computer based (so as to leverage the resources of a server vs. your own computer) and you’re looking for programs that will not only track ads but will also help you calculate cost-per-click, cost-per-sale, and click-to-sales ratios for each ad. Each of these is important to help you calculate your return on investment.

A potentially better alternative would be to find an affiliate marketing system or network marketing company that comes with its own tracking built into the lead capture pages of the company. This way setup is much easier for you as the marketing program itself does the tracking for you, or at least works in conjunction with your ad tracking program.

Something to keep in mind is some advertising methods don’t allow the use of tracking codes. An easy way around this is to purchase a series of inexpensive web domains. By inexpensive I mean less than a dollar each. You then use these domains in your ads and use the web service provider to forward those URLs to your tracking URLs. Now you have a nice clean looking URL in your advertisement and still have effective tracking.

In order for your network marketing business to be profitable, you must have customers, and customers come from advertising. Your focus as a marketer should be to generate the best return for your advertising dollar. The only way to know which advertising yields the best results is to track each and every thing you do and review the tracking results on a regular basis. This way you know where to put your hard earned marketing dollars and can insure that you will be increasing your profits as time goes on.

Copyright 2009 Inspire International Inc.

By: Chris & Julie Chojnowski

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Chris and Julie Chojnowski have been freeing people from "The Matrix" for over 15 years and assisting them to Master their Destiny and Inspire their World by teaching them about the concept of G.P.T. Get Your Free Report Now! HowToProsperNow.info