Track Your Online Campaign Effectively!

HI Friends,

I'm back with a brand new topic and that is "Conversion Tracking". Don't get confused that I'm talking about PPC/CPC/CPM. It is all about SEO and ethical internet marketing. Most of you has been doing link campaigning for quite a sometime and we all are well aware of the fact better search engine ranking can be achieved by obtain as many quality back links to the optimized site as we can. There are several strategies we adopt to maintain the quality and quantity of a link building campaign and in this process we overlook certain strategies that have really a great potential to drive to your traffic. But on the other hand they won't help you in improving you search engine ranking. For example, we can consider social bookmarking, blog comment posting and commenting on various relevant forums. These sources really have a great potential to drive major direct traffic to your site and if the campaign managed properly, then we can make the most out of this. Let's discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of some of these wired out SEO strategies.

Advantages:

Social bookmarking, blogging & commenting to various blogs, replying forums are some of the popular ways of digital activities. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, stumbleupon.com, clip marks and so on, have got immense popularity and have millions of users to their credit. Users sign up and start sharing their favorite digital resources with other users as well as with all the internet users, too. So if you have something interesting and scholarly and think the information should be shared with others, then social bookmarking sites are the best internet resources to target at. Blogging has revolutionized internet. It is the significant part of the Digital Freedom as bloggers step forward to share whatever they like. Bloggers do add a personal touch to their information and as a result people take maximum interest in chasing the resources. People read blogs and maintain blogs and do comment on the posts. When I searched for "site:blogspot.com" I found 126,000,000 pages indexed by Google and in Yahoo! the number is more exciting as it is 282,000,000. So if you don't have your blog in of the blogging sites like blogger.com, wordpress.com, livejournal.com or any other popular blogging site, then it is the right time to get into the business. Forums as we know the popular way of discussing issues, problems and facts online. They are a bit orthodox, but effective way of clarifying doubts and resolving issues. Forums are the most reliable online sources where people seriously involve getting help basically. There is no place for casual or personal conversation and every forum user is an expert in his/her own field. You can start a thread putting a question or an issue and thus get solutions and suggestions from other users as replies and vice versa. So these are the advantages that I've discussed so far. Let's go to the disadvantage section of the above things.

Most of the SEO experts believe links with [rel="nofollow"] has no value for a website as a link with such an attribute never crawled by search engine algorithm. Yes...of course they are right, but I would like to put a simple question: Why should a website be optimized? The answer is very simple, "of course for TRAFFIC." The search engines might be the best ever source for targeted traffic, but blogs, forums and social book markings can drive a good number of traffic to your website, although they won't help your site achieving better ranking in search engines. Because most of the blogging sites (including social book marking and forum) sites do add NOFOLLOW attribute to the hyperlinks especially created in the comments part just to stop link spamming. But you can still exploit this part for better traffic. We are really unaware of this fact, because we never track how many clicks exactly the site receives from such links. Here I would like you to give some insights and tips that could really help you in tracking clicks properly from such link campaigning.

Most of you are well aware of Google's AdWords program and its usefulness. In April 4, 2005, Google introduced conversion tracking facility for the non-AdWords campaigns. As MarketingVOX informs, “Google recently introduced a ‘cross-channel conversion tracker’ feature to AdWords that allows search marketers to track the campaigns for both Google and non-Google advertising in the same interface. Google sets up a network of tracking URLs that advertisers use in their non-Google campaign (Google's page on the new feature specifically mentions its arch competitor Overture). Google then keeps tabs on conversions across the entire campaign.

The new feature gives Google some competitive visibility into how well its own advertising does relative to other media options. It may even contribute data on useful and relevant pages that might not yet be in Google's web index, or placed highly enough in the ranks.

The new feature's release comes just at the time Google bought log analysis software firm Urchin, reportedly in order to offer the tracking services to its search advertisers - still another source of information that would inform Google about the still vast number of pages, traffic and relevance that exist outside the Google web economy.”

I’ve just given a slight twist to this Cross-Channel Conversion Tracker option of AdWords. The objective is to systematize the internet marketing that is more aimed at increasing traffic than search engine ranking. Obviously the target is social book marking, comment posting to various blogs and forum posting. Here Follows the STEPs that you need to follow:

STEP 1

Log in to your AdWords account; if you don’t have any AdWords account then Sign Up now and never forget to choose the Standard Edition.

Click on the Conversion Tracking tab to create Cross-Channel Conversion tracking code for your site. You can download the PDF guide to create Cross-Channel Conversion for your campaigning.

The general steps are

Choose channel

>

Provide details

>

Insert code and URLs

>

Test setup

In the Choose Channel Section, you need to choose Other online ads, then click the Continue button and assign a name to the Campaign name and put the URL that you want to drive traffic in the Destination URL field (NB: Destination URL is the URL/web page to which your links point to). Once you are done with this section will provide you a JavaScript code. As per Google, “This is slightly different from the Google Site Stats code that you've pasted into your conversion pages, but the set-up process is the same. First, make a backup copy of your landing page before adding the code. Then, insert (or ask your technical team to insert) the entire block of code. Finally, keep a copy of the code in a file for reference.” Select your language and the code will be like this:

In the next step you will get one Tracking URL (one like in the following picture) that you can use while creating hyperlinks while commenting blogs, book marking or replying forum threads.

For targeted traffic and better conversion, you need to use your experience as an SEO expert. Collect as many theme related blogs as you can and start commenting blogs. Right comments (50-100 words) and create hyperlinks using the Tracking URL. Thus you can use the same tracking URL or can create separate campaign for individual campaigns for Social bookmarking sites and forums sites. The more wide and particular, you become in your campaign, the comprehensive and elaborate report you would get from this. You can get details of your traffic, clicks and conversion right one the Campaign Summary page.

I’m sincerely looking for your comments and feedbacks on the post. Please share this posting with your friends. Keep visiting the blog as I’ll be back with another such interesting posting next time.

Till then good bye. This is Amit Mishra, Signing out