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One time or another in your marketing efforts you will want to track your advertising's effectiveness, and in that tracking you will need to track outside your website (ie. Where are these hits coming from?). You may want to know: Are my FFA submissions doing any good? How many are clicking on my link from my email ad?

The average webmaster with limited web abilities and hosting constraints will see the expense of CGI scripts and turn to third party services for tracking. Such places as Roibot and Link Scout provide these services and are commonly used. But the problem is that these links are long and easily recognized as tracking links and are often ignored.

Let's be honest. How many times have you seen that all too familiar tracking link and just passed it by? It may be for any number of reasons. You think,it's not a domain name, so it must be some affiliate program. If you don't know where you're going, you're not going to go there. Either way, the point is you can hurt your business trying to track your ads. If you have spent a year branding your name on the Internet, are you going to throw that power away in order to track your ad campaigns?

You CAN have your cake and eat it too; you just have to go about it a little differently. In the following are two methods availiable to the average marketer with limited resources:

1.) URL Redirection: If you do not have a domain name of your own, you can use a redirected URL. There are many places that offer this service for free such as http://www.shorturl.com/ or http://www.atmypage.com/. A URL redirect service allows you to assign a different URL to your actual link. It's really the same as the tracking link accept you're using this for appearance, to hide the tracking URL, and to make your URL more user friendly. There are all different kinds of names that are offered, such as safelists.com, or web-freebies.com; names that actually reflect your website or offer.

2.) On-site Tracking: When you do own your domain name, you want to use it. And having access to a website to have that domain name parked makes you a serious marketer. Chances are you have some form of on-site tracking like AXS CGI Script(http://www.xav.com/scripts/axs/). It is very popular and has a free demo you can use to check it out. Using such a tracking script is great for tracking page hits with ease or for tracking referrals and links FROM your site. However, it is not the best for tracking email links INTO your site to let you know what ad or avenue brought them to you. It is really simple though to just add a copy of your sales page and use a different page name, for example (http:yoursite.com/sale1.html). You get to use your own domain name, the URL is still short, the page will show a hit in your database, and it can be linked to any email ad you want to run. Sometimes simple does the job just fine.

So when it comes to tracking, consider the ramifications of your tracking URL, and if need be, use various methods you may come up with to get both jobs done, tracking your ads and branding your name.