The beauty about internet marketing is that every advertisement you place can be monitored. For example every individual click that comes to your website can be tracked. For example, you can monitor pay-per-click (PPC) ads down to the level of the keywords that the searcher typed in to find your ad. Proceeding a step further, you are able to track the resulting sales coming from that click. Regardless of whether you're using free or paid advertising to get traffic to your site, it is crucial to be able to measure the effects of your campaigns.

As a business organisation, you must know your return on investment (ROI) for your advertizing campaigns. In the realm of offline advertising such as newsprint or magazine classified advertisements, you'll frequently find that advertisers use a different department number or Post Office box for each advert. They use the same mailing address just adding another departmental code. In this way, they can track how different ads perform based on the enquiries that get directed to the different departments.

This works also for the 800 numbers that you call to get more info about products that you've seen or learned about. Companies can establish different toll-free numbers used for each advertisement and that's how they can monitor the effectiveness of multiple ad campaigns. In offline promotion, it's much more expensive to set up the tracking. Imagine the costs associated with arranging different phone numbers or multiple PO boxes.

In the internet world, however, tracking becomes much cheaper as you are able to apply it using an mixture of scripts or software packages. With PPC advertising, you are able to easily use a simple PHP script to enable you to capture the keywords coming from a Google search referral - not to mention Google analytics.

Let's take a look at another example. With a lot of web hosting packages, you're allowed to implement multiple email addresses. You are able to set it up so that in each advert you use a different email address. Then when you get an email inquiry to a specific e-mail address, you'll know where that enquiry originated from. Another way to do this is to establish multiple subdomains to use as the link in your ads. For instance, if you're advertising in online sites, you are able to duplicate the same ad copy but send the readers to a different subdomain using a different URL for each ad.

When you're able to track the efforts of all your advertising, you can sit down at the end of the business month and work out which campaigns are generating the best ROI. You are then able to scale those campaigns or fine-tune them to try and maximise your profit. If you're not monitoring today.