This applies whether it is banner advertising, small ads, newsletters or whatever. It is essential to understanding the most effective form of promotion for you.

A means of tracking your promotions is needed so that you know exactly which banner or ad sends people to your site.

There are several ways to do this, depending on your budget.

By far the best way for the small - medium business is by using ROIbot.

ROIbot is part of an awesome suite of tools you can use on any web site.

The ROIbot Ad Tracker will track the effectiveness of your ad campaigns or any link on the net.

We use it and thoroughly recommend it. To see more details click here.

Free, Ultimate Link Tracker software

Now you can track the effectiveness of all your marketing efforts. It's far better than ad-tracking software costing $50 and up, and every bit as good as professional software costing as much as $17 per month.

It's Free to 5 Pillar Affiliates...

and see how to get this software free - AND - become an Affiliate in the best program around.

Simple Affiliate Links

If you don't want to install ROIbot, you could try the do-it-yourself approach.

A simple way is to set up each ad in the form of an Affiliate link. For example, instead of having your banner link just point to your site as in:

www.theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com/admin/linkdemo.htm

you would put

theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com/admin/linkdemo.htm?camefrom=100&backto=document.url

On the page where the link sends you, you would extract the identifier of the particular banner (in this case a number = 100) with a bit of JavaScript:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

function WhereWasI() {

var handyString = window.location.search;

var startOfSource = handyString.indexOf("camefrom=");

if (startOfSource != -1) {

var endOfSource = handyString.indexOf("&",startOfSource + 9);

var result = handyString.substring(startOfSource + 9, endOfSource);

}

else

var result = "Source Unknown";

return result;

}

if (WhereWasI() != "Source Unknown")

document.write("Your Referring ID is: "+ WhereWasI() + " ")

else

document.write("Your Referring ID is: 100");

</SCRIPT>

This extracts the referring ID (in this case the number 100) and writes it to the page. You can access this in several ways, for example to enter it into a form. 

To see it in action click on the following link:

theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com/admin/linkdemo.htm?camefrom=100&amp;backto=document.url

CGI Scripts

Another way is to use cgi scripts. We have not used this on our site, but here is a description if you want to try it. click here

Simple Affiliate Tracking Software

Here is a simple affiliate program, that comes at an extremely low cost. We haven't tried it though: http://www.simpleaffiliate.com/index.cgi?1428