30 Day Challenge 2008: Day 7 - Tracking And Analytics

Day 7 is all about setting up tracking so that you can monitor what promotional strategies are producing results and what aren’t. We can also find out what keywords people are searching for in the search engines to find your site which is very useful information. Yet again Google come to the rescue and provide another free tool which is as good as most paid tools called Google Analytics

You will also learn a method for tracking affiliate links using another service provided by The 30 Day Challenge team. You can access it by going into your 30 Day Challenge dashboard and scrolling down you will see a link on the left hand sidebar titled ‘TDC Stats Tracker’ or clicking here www.thirtydaychallenge.com/tracking/viewtrackers.php

All you need to do is click the new URL button and paste in whatever affiliate link you wish to track. You will then be provided with a URL which looks like this http://locatereviews.com/2052517237 which will redirect to your affiliate link location. You will then be able to track how many times the link has been clicked on.

I use Google Analytics to track my affiliate links which provides more data and also allows you to use URL’s which match your site such as yoursite.com/more-info/affilliate-product.php rather than locatereviews.com/2052517237

To do this you need to create a text document on your computer and use the following code

Replace the link http://www.domain.com/affiliate-link with your affiliate link and replace UA-000000-0 with your Google Analytics ID.

Save the document as affiliate-product-name.php

You then need to create a directory(folder) on your site called ‘go’, ‘more-info’, ‘review’ or basically whatever you like and upload the file into that directory. You should now be able to load the file in your browser and it will redirect to your affiliate link.

Today’s Videos

How to Setup Google Analytics

A video showing how to set up a Google Analytics account and configuring it on your Wordpress blog.

How to Track Affiliate Links

How to use the The 30 Day Tracking link tracking system.

Add Tracked Links On Your Blog

How to add your links generated by The 30 Day Challenge link tracking system to your Wordpress blog.

Summary of Day 7

Tracking is an essential part of any online business and provides you with extremely valuable information to help your business succeed.

Google Analytics is a great tool which I use on a daily basis to keep track of how my sites are performing and as it’s free it’s perfect for people starting out on the internet.

For those getting itchy feet we should now be moving on to the promotional stage where you will start to learn how to generate traffic to your Wordpress blog and hopefully make some sales.

See you on day 8!