How to Track Your Email Marketing Results
One of the greatest attributes of web advertising is its ability to be tracked. Without tracking its difficult to tell how many visitors are responding to your newsletter advertisements unless they order from you and tell you where they saw you.
Wouldn’t you like to know how many people clicked on your offer even if they don’t order?
This information is important. The following tracking strategy has been used for several Digital Harvest campaigns and is fairly easy to implement. This strategy does require some minor HTML skills. Primarily it requires the ability to cut and paste a tracker code to the bottom of your offer page and change the two variables where necessary.
Set Up a Relay Page
The easiest way to track clicks on a newsletter advertisement is by setting up a relay page that has a code to show each time it’s loaded. This relay page (also known as a refresh page) is where you will send your visitors. The refresh page is set up strictly for tracking purposes. You’ve probably seen them before. These pages load quickly and before you have a chance to do anything, magically take you to a new page.
You’ve just been tracked.
You can see an example of a refresh page by visiting the following URL:
http://www.businessemaillists.com/refresh.asp
You will notice that the page loads and after a second or two you are automatically taken to the destination page, which is our newsletter signup page. The refresh page quickly tracked your visit and since this is the only location in which we publish the above URL, we know that visitors to this page have read our report. If it were an ad we could name these refresh pages.
Sample Refresh Code:
“n” is the number of seconds it takes before the visitor is forwarded to the web page listed as the “http://www.destination.com.”
Be sure to place the refresh coding in the webpage’s header tag.
You can now use different URLs in your advertising so you can learn which ads performed the best. By setting up different refresh pages, each named after a different creative, you can quickly track click-thrus.
