Facebook Marketing and PPC are all the rage right now to get in front of a target audience very quickly.  It doesn’t make marketing any easier but getting in front of targeted customers is more than half the battle for most!

However, just because it is pretty simple to do this, it doesn’t mean that it gives us a license to do dumb things when it comes to marketing our stuff.

Many marketers make this mistake especially when they are in the testing / beginner phase, so I am going to help you see the light so that you learn the right way early instead of learning the wrong / hard way.

Marketing On Many Platforms

It is the best practice never to put all your eggs in one basket (who hasn’t heard that advice 100 times in their life?).  This holds true for marketing as well.  Just because Facebook is a great place to market content, that doesn’t mean we should be neglecting other platforms like marketing to a list, doing webinars about what we are selling, and other social platforms like Twitter and Google Plus.

However, if we are marketing everywhere, then how do we know where the heck our sales are coming from if we do make sales? It is VERY bad practice to only use one link for all of your marketing. If you have one link, even if you are tracking clicks, you are not going to know ANYTHING about the effectiveness of your marketing.  You need to be able to track so that you know where to spend the majority of your advertising dollars…and the only way to know this is to go about marketing the right way and here’s what I mean….

Here Are 3 Things You Can Do  To Help Track Your Marketing Progress

1) Set up special tracking links – You are definitely going to want to set up special tracking links for your offers. This will not only show you where your sales are coming from, but it will also help you track your clicks. YOU WANT TO TRACK YOUR CLICKS!! Sorry to yell, but you can’t be lazy about this. You want to track your clicks so that you know which platforms are getting you the most number of clicks. If you are getting 50% of your clicks from Twitter and only 20% on Facebook, that is telling you A LOT about your marketing and your audience.

There are many solutions (free and paid) to set up tracking links.

If you use  wordpress, there is a free plugin called Link Cloaking that sets up very “pretty” links that have your own URL attached to them.

There are link shortening sites like bitly.com, ow.ly.com, Tiny URL – there are tons! If you just do a search for URL shorteners, you will find all you need. I personally like bitly but that’s just my preference

2) Another Option For Detailed Tracking – This is another layer deeper to just setting up basic tracking links. Besides using 3rd party sites and plugins that will help you track, you can also use them in conjunction with a little known tracking trick you can use with anything you are marketing.

For example, let’s say you sell tshirts on Teespring.

When you design your URL for teespring, it’s going to be something like:

http://teespring.com/ilovedogs (the red represents whatever you name your URL – let’s use ilovedogs as an example)

==> What you want to do is add this “code” to the end of your URL:

http://teespring.com/ilovedogs?var=fbad1 (The var= could be whatever you want it to be and it should detail where that link is being marketed)

So let’s say you are marketing a post on Facebook, you might have one URL being:

http://teespring.com/ilovedogs?var=fbad1

And let’s also say you are marketing to an email list, you might want that URL to be:

http://teespring.com/ilovedogs?var=email

Do you see what we are doing? Now we are being very smart marketers and seeing where our advertising is most effective!

Tip: Before any campaign goes live, always remember to test your links and make sure they always go where you want them to go

How To Put This To Use…

For our example above, once you set up all your links, you are now set up to know where your sales are coming from in Teespring. Head on over to analytics.teespring.com and you will see the details of your campaign and who is buying what you are selling! 

All the way at the bottom of the page when you click on Analytics, you will see where your sales came from – it’s like magic!

I urge you to set these links up for whatever you are trying to test. If you are testing gender, set up one link for men and one link for women. If you are testing age, set up one link for one age group and another for another age group. If you are testing interests, that’s right, you got it, set up different links for different interests. This is THE ONLY way you are really going to know where your sales are coming from.

There are other platforms that will have similar ways of doing this kind of tracking. For example, some affiliate sites call this Sub ID’s.  Each platform may have their own way of tracking that is different (but similar concept) to the example I show with Teespring above. Most sites will be pretty detailed on how you go about setting these Sub ID’s up. Sites like Clickbank make this process fairly easy.

Tip Worth Repeating: Always test your links before running your campaign

3) Set Up Conversion Tracking – I really want you to get used to setting up different tracking links for your campaigns.  But if you really want to do things right, then you should look into setting up conversion scripts and or pixels.

I will save this topic for tomorrow’s post and I will link to it in this article so you don’t miss it 🙂

==> Until then, please share with us below your style and methods of tracking links