Metrics- Finding Out What Works

Tell me if this sounds familiar....
You create a product or choose an affiliate offer to sell.
Then you start "marketing ....
-You make a YouTube Video
-Post some pins on Pinterest
-Start posting on your Facebook Fan Page.
-Building an email list and setting up autoresponder emails
-Distributing press releases
-Writing articles for your blog
You start doing all of these things to start driving visitors to your offer to make SALES.
And all of these things take up a good chunk of your time to do.
Then all of a sudden IT happens...
You MAKE A SALE!
You get all excited and can't wait to start making more sales except there is one problem.
You have no idea which one of your marketing efforts resulted in a SALE....you don't know where that sale came from, so you have no clue what to do again to get more sales.
Welcome to the world that 95% of online marketers live in...the "throw crap against the wall and hope something sticks" world.
Take my advice... GET OUT Of That World As Fast As You Can!
You can't build a successful business in that world. 
A successful business occurs when you know your METRICs and have reliable TRACKING set up to monitor what's going on in your business.

Lets take that same example from above and this time added a unique tracking link to each of the promotions:
(All the tracking links below send people to your offer)
-You make a YouTube Video - Tracking Link 1
-Post a pin on Pinterest - Tracking Link 2
-Post on your Facebook Fan Page. - - Tracking Link 3
- Building an email list and setting up autoresponder emails - Tracking Link 4,5 & 6 (one link per email)
- Distribute press release - Tracking Link 7
-Writing articles for your blog - Tracking Link 8, & 9 (one for each article)
The tracking links keep track of everyone who clicks on your link and follows them to your offer page.
And when they purchase your product, the system tracks which tracking link referred the sale.
So in our example, if you had tracking set up and you made a sale, you could look at your tracking report and see that the sale that just came in came from someone clicking on the link in your autoresponder email #2.

Can you see how powerful that is?

When you know exactly where your traffic and your sales are coming from, then you can make informed "data driven" decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts to drive more sales.
Also if you notice that you get a TON of clicks on your Pinterest Pins, but get zero sales, then you know that you can stop wasting your time on Pinterest and focus on growing your other marketing channels that do convert.
So what's the catch?
There really isn't one, except for the fact that most online marketers are scared of tracking because it sounds complicated to set up and get going with.
The reality of the situation is, it really ISN'T that hard and there are a number of viable tracking solutions available to you.
In fact, you can do some basic sales tracking inside your ClickBank account using the Analytics section in your dashboard and either a TID or a VTID tracking tag at the end of your CB HopLink.
If you are an affiliate then you use the TID tag which goes on the end of your affiliate HopLink. This TID is a "Tracking ID" that you can name anything you want.
The tag looks like this: ?tid= YOURTIDHERE
A complete Affiliate HopLink with TID looks like:
http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=YOURTIDHERE

And the YOURTIDHERE can be replaced with identifier text you want so you can track where your sales come from.
To learn more information about HopLink TID's, click here.
If you are a Vendor, then you can use a VTID to track sales from your various payment links if you want to track sales through one channel. 
The VTID can be made dynamic to allow for promotion tracking, but it requires some custom coding.
For a long time more advanced tracking solutions have been hard to implement without a developer on staff, but in the last 18 months several different tracking & metrics companies have popped up that specialize in simplifying the process of tracking metrics in your business. Our favorite out of those companies and the one Los and I use in all of our businesses is called Improvely.
It's got sexy looking interface that you can see in the image below, and it has a very simple process for getting set up to track practically everything in your business.
So, if you are tired of guessing what's working in your business and are ready to take your business success seriously, then I can't urge you enough to start tracking your businesses metrics.
We recommend Improvely, because it's what we know and use, but there are certainly other tracking solutions out there.
It's not important to us which tracking solution you choose, just so long as you START TRACKING.
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