The success of any business depends to a great extent on the effectiveness with which the business is marketed. On the net there are numerous avenues of marketing your business, opportunity or simply any information you wish to convey to the interested people. But marketing without measuring its effectiveness is like walking blind-folded and hoping to reach the destination.

Compared to the traditional off-line marketing, the on-line marketing over the net is inexpensive and can be launched extremely fast. The results of marketing will also come equally fast. If you wish to promote your stuff on the net you are easily able to employ several marketing methods at the same time. You may be using email marketing, article marketing, forum based promotion, SEO, pay per click or less targeted methods like banner display. There are many other marketing methods to choose from. And quite likely you will be using several methods at the same time. You have the advantage of speed and low cost of net based marketing. But are all these methods equally effective? Certainly not.

You have spent your time, energy and money for putting each of your marketing initiative in place. You will probably repeat your efforts and use about the same methods again, and get the same results. Is it possible to improve results second time with same efforts?

It is possible with ad tracking which is an extremely useful tool. Surprisingly very few internet marketers use it properly. By ad tracking you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing initiative. You can take feed back of your marketing campaigns, analyze the marketing methods you have used and make your subsequent campaigns more and more effective.

All your marketing campaigns are aimed at directing your prospective customer or subscriber to a particular web page. You provide link to that page for the interested persons. You will give the link in the resource box of your articles, in the signature of your postings in forums, in your ezine ads, in your banner ads, in your emails and in all the marketing methods you are using. You get visitors on your webpage, but if you have provided same URL everywhere how will you know which link has sent more visitors to your page?

This is where ad tracker is used. You can provide a different URL in each of your ads or message, and all these URLs will direct the visitors to the same web page. But you can know how many times each link has been clicked in your ads, how many of your emails were opened, even the cost benefit analysis of your campaigns. This information is extremely useful in planning your future campaigns. You will know which ad has given you more visitors, which ad needs to be modified, and which ad should be dropped. There are ad tracking agencies, both free and paid, where you can register and start using their services.

Ad tracker is a tool. And like any other tool its usefulness depends upon its actual usage. It costs very little to use it and gives most valuable information. By using ad tracker wisely you can prevent your marketing from being a hit and trial campaign and you will stop groping in the dark. Ad tracker can save you a lot of time and other resources. You will know exactly what is working for you and where you can improve.