Why Everyone In Affiliate Marketing Needs An Ad Tracker

You've probably heard a lot of stories about people striking it rich as affiliate marketers and it is certainly true that there is a lot of money to be made in affiliate marketing. However, most people who get involved in the industry don’t end up making a fortune. The people who manage to make a financial success of their affiliate marketing ventures are those who plan ahead and exhibit the commitment and persistence needed to see their business through to success.

You probably hear about how easy it is to get started in affiliate marketing, which is also true. However, the only way to really make a significant amount of money this way is by putting in some time and no small amount of hard work to promote your affiliate products or services. It really doesn’t matter how great a product you may have, you need to get the consumer’s attention if you want to start earning large commissions.

Promotion is the key to affiliate marketing success; your links and banners will just sit there, not even seen let alone clicked unless you put in some effort to make sure that people are coming to your website in the first place. No clicks equals no income when you’re in the affiliate marketing business.

This isn’t to say that you can’t make an income from affiliate marketing which is comparable to or even better than what you’re currently earning working full time. Once you’ve got your business running smoothly, you can even continue making money while you’re asleep, on vacation or doing anything else.

It all starts with a well designed, user-friendly website. You need well written, genuinely informative content that visitors will want to read and that conveys the benefits of the affiliate products or services you’re promoting without hitting them over the head with a hard sell approach. You’ll want to include your banners and text links as well, obviously.

Once you have a website which visitors will want to stick around and explore (and hopefully recommend to friends and family), the next step is to promote your site using a variety of online marketing methods. Forum marketing, newsletters and email marketing efforts, article marketing and of course, what we’re really here to talk about today, Google AdWords and other contextual advertising models.

You can’t just throw up some AdWords ads and hope for the best if you want to make your affiliate marketing business a success. Your ads need to be carefully crafted, monitored and fine tuned for better performance. You need to track the results of your advertising regularly and make adjustments as necessary.

It’s actually even easier to do than it sounds like, especially if you use tracking software to keep an eye on the results your ads are getting. One of the best tracking software packages out there is called simply AffiliateProphet. This is a program which is designed specifically to address the marketing needs of affiliate marketers and is favored by beginners as well as seasoned experts in the affiliate marketing field. If you’re new to the field, you may be wondering exactly what an ad tracker is and what it does. It’s actually rather simple. An ad tracker is software which lets you monitor the click-throughs your advertisements or web pages or referral links receive in detail. There are also services like HyperTracker which can perform ad tracking for you.

An ad tracker is particularly useful to those who are promoting multiple affiliate marketing programs and have a number of different contextual advertising campaigns ongoing at any given time. An ad tracker lets you watch how your campaigns are performing so you can find out how your ads are doing whether these are PPC ads, banner ads or links in email marketing campaigns, forums, article directories or any other sort of online promotional efforts.

In affiliate marketing just as in any other sort of marketing, return on investment is the name of the game. You’d like to keep your marketing budget as small as possible – even if you have some extra money to put towards your marketing efforts, you’d still like to make sure that you’re getting the best possible return for each and every cent you spend. This is why tracking software is so valuable for those persons engaged in affiliate marketing. You can find out exactly how many clicks your ads have received and where – and how many of these clicks led to a purchase (and thus a commission payment for you). This is the kind of information a marketer needs to fine tune their advertising campaigns on the fly to maximize their performance.

Knowing how your ads and your affiliate program in general are performing lets you increase your efforts where they’re doing the most good and dropping them in areas where they’re not getting you results. Tracking software can even help you to determine if a given affiliate program is worth your time and effort to continue or if you’d be better off moving on to another.

Affiliate marketing is a business and it can be a profitable one if you treat it like a business. You need to make your decisions based on solid data and with a results-driven approach. Being able to have all of the important facts at your fingertips can help you avoid sticking with an unsuccessful program for too long or dropping one prematurely when it’s just beginning to build.

Success in affiliate marketing takes the same hard work and marketing efforts as success in any other kind of business does. If you’re not managing to generate as many sales as you’d like, it may not be that the affiliate program itself is no good – you may just need to take a slightly different approach with your advertising. An ad tracker can give you the data you need to adjust your ads to get optimal results and make the most of each and every affiliate program you choose to work with.