The Importance of Tracking in Affiliate Marketing

In affiliate marketing, you can easily distinguish the experts from the noobs. Most newbies don’t do tracking. In fact and surprisingly, they don’t even seem to know how to track and don’t show any interests in tracking. Probably one of the many reasons why most “affiliate marketers” doesn’t really make money with affiliate marketing.

Tracking is essential, just like testing and tweaking, it helps us do well and improve our own campaigns. By tracking, we come to have an idea of what is working and what’s not working w/c will then give us the opportunity to tweak.

There are several tools that you can use to track your own affiliate marketing campaigns but you don’t need to use a lot. If you are with Pay-per click networks like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search and MSN Ad Center, you can already have that built-in tracking with them because they have the data, although only basic tracking.

You can also make good use of Google Analytics if you have landing page for the product that you intend to build in for long term. Besides being free, you also get to enjoy all the add-on tools that the Analytics provide.

Lastly, there is an awesome service known as Tracking202. It’s amazingly free and it’s a very reliable service that can pretty much do advance tracking for your campaigns. You can either opt to use the free hosted version or the premium self-hosted version (needs a dedicated server). Unlike analytics, tracking202 is nearly real-time with its flawless tracking and I don’t know any other program that does tracking superbly combined with reliability and affordable cost than the 202 product. It’s also fully integrated with the major pay-per click networks so you’ll not have any issue with it.

Not tracking is a murderous crime in affiliate marketing. Do not think I am over-exaggerating things here. If you’re not tracking your campaigns yet then start doing so now, and you will be ahead of many other marketers. What say you?