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5 Types of Links You May Not Have Thought of Tracking
By Jill Whalen (c0 2010

Think you're doing a good job of tracking and measuring the
success of every link to your website that gets announced to
the world in some fashion?

While most website marketers are tracking website referrals
from search engines, as well as links from other websites and
paid search advertising campaigns, a lot of visitors show up
as "Direct Traffic." Do you ever wonder where they came from?
I know that I do!

I've talked about campaign tracking
(http://m1e.net/c?31787615-jA5rLiNeCxxDw%405338678-C8qaATznXnj.w)
via Google Analytics before, so I won't bore you with the
mechanics of how to create these links so they don't look ugly.
But do read that article if you need a refresher course. After
you have a good system in place for adding campaign tracking
codes to your URLs, the most important thing you can do is
remember to use them on everything!

So here are 5 categories of links that you may not have thought
about tracking, but should be:

1. Email Signature Links. Most of you have at least one link to
your website in your email signature that goes out in most every
email you send. But how many of you are tracking whether anyone
clicks on them or not? I know that I rarely click on other
people's email signature links. With that in mind, I was curious
whether mine ever get clicked, so I appended them with some
campaign tracking codes. Turns out they don't get too many
clicks (just 8 this past month), but keep in mind that I don't
have any sort of call to action in my signature, as some do. It
would be fun to experiment with different offers in the signature
to see how those fare.

2. Specific Words or Graphics Within Your Website. Do you have
call-to-action buttons or text links on various pages of your
website where you're trying to elicit a specific response from
your site visitors? Are you measuring them? For instance, on our
website we have an image prominently featured on every page. It
rotates between a call-out to subscribe to the High Rankings
Advisor newsletter and one that provides more info on our
low-end SEO website review. Because I look at the site every day
and am not part of our target audience, I'm basically blind to
the images.

For a long time I assumed that most who visited our site would
never click those images. Well, you know what they say about
ASSuming things! After I added tracking codes to those images, I
learned that people do indeed click them, and about 75% of those
who click the newsletter image end up following through and
subscribing. And more than 5% of those click to the SEO review
page and fill out our contact form for more information. Hardly
what I would call blind!

3. Offline Marketing. You should of course have specific
tracking URLs for any offline advertising you do in radio, TV,
newspapers and magazines. But remember to add tracking codes to
your links from other places where you're able to list your
website URL, such as business cards, classified ads and
telephone book ads. Does your business have a sign? How about
a tracked URL there? Have a VW Beetle wrapped as a roving ad
for your website? Use a tracking URL. Give your website address
out on the phone a lot? Provide a tracking URL.

4. Article Bio Links. You all know the power of writing content
such as guest articles for other websites, blogs and newsletters
in your niche, but are you tracking those links? While you can
see the referring URL in your analytics when they come from a
specific website, you can get more granular with your analysis
when you have added tracking codes to the links back. For
instance, with tracking codes in place, you can see which
articles, in general, referred the most traffic to your site
regardless of where they were posted.

5. Social Media Status Updates. I covered this one in the
aforementioned article, so I won't belabor it, but didn't want
to leave it out because any links that you Tweet, add to
Facebook, or leave in a LinkedIn update should have tracking
codes. Clicks from social media often come without a referrer
for many reasons, making campaign tracking your best bet for
measuring their effectiveness. Remember to use tracking URLs
in your profile link back to your site as well, so you can
easily know which profiles bring actual site visitors and
which don't.

Only with campaign tracking codes appended to any and all URLs
can you quickly and easily know what media are bringing visitors
to your site, as well as seeing what actions they take (or don't)
once they get there!
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Jill Whalen, CEO  of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has
been performing SEO services (http://www.highrankings.com/seo-services)
since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor
newsletter (http://www.highrankings.com/newsletter/) and the
High Rankings SEO forum.
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