Are YOU getting your Money's Worth
When Buying Traffic?
The beginner's guide to tracking click-throughs and ROI from pay-per-click engines.
By Robin Nobles and Dave Barry

If you're just beginning to try your hand with the pay-per-click engines, one thing you need to know is the importance of setting up tracking URL's so you're better able to track click-throughs and sales.

Why go to the trouble? Because if you don't set up some sort of tracking system, you'll never know if your keyword purchases are really working for you. And if you don't know if they're working for you, you won't be able to make an educated decision on whether or not to discard a keyword campaign, expand it, choose different keywords, etc.

There are some excellent software programs and services on the market that will track individual keyword purchases and determine your ROI (return on investment), and we'll name some of them at the end of this article. For those who purchase large numbers of keywords, such programs are crucial.

But this article is for those who are just getting started and who don't want to invest in a software program yet – they just want to purchase a few keywords and get their feet wet with the pay-per-click engines.

Using a Tracking URL to Track Traffic

Overture claims that 95 percent of all Overture traffic comes from their partner sites, such as Yahoo and MSN. So, it's important to track your Overture traffic so you can be sure how much traffic you're getting for each of your keyword purchases.

Let's say that your URL is http://www.english-bulldogs.com. To add tracking capability to such a URL, you'd tack on:

?source=Overture

...so your URL would look this:

    http://www.english-bulldogs.com/?source=Overture

If the keyword phrase you're tracking is english bulldog puppies, here's the tracking URL you would use:

    http://www.english-bulldogs.com/?source=Overture&kw=english+bulldog+puppies

Change the URL you have listed with Overture for that k...