http://www.yoursite.com

You might find that this site actually exists, however, for the purpose of this tutorial we will assume that it is a fictional site. The first screen you will see when you log into your account is the main statistics page (pictured below)

Notice the yellow circles in the image above? You may click either one of those two hyperlinks to go to the next screen where you will be able to create your first campaign. Please note, if you have already created a campaign, you will not see the line with the second yellow circle at the bottom. When you click on one of the hyperlinks mentioned above, you will come to  a screen similar to the image below. The only difference is that the form will not yet be filled in.

In the top textbox you will now enter the address of the website or product you want to promote. In this case it will be

http://www.yoursite.com

In the second textbox you need to enter a Title or description which will help you identify this campaign. In this case we will just call it campaign1. When you click the "Add URL" button, you will now see a screen similar to the image below. This screen will also contain more help if you get stuck.

This is the most basic tracking link you can get. Rather than putting

http://www.yoursite.com 

in your advertising emails, you now use the address

http://trackthatad.com/i/?i=3098/

Every time somebody now clicks on this link or copy and paste it into their browser, they will first come through to TrackThatAd.com where the click will be recorded and the visitor will be redirected to

http://www.yoursite.com

For our pro members, this process happens so fast, the visitor will not even know that they came to TrackThatAd.com first. For free members, the visitor will first go through our ad gateway before the visitor will end up on the promoted website.

Taking things 1 step further, the whole purpose of ad tracking or link tracking is to determine which advertising resources gives you the best responses. Even though you can certainly create a new tracking url for every advertising resource you want to track, there is a much easier way. Just append a keyword to the end of your tracking url. This keyword can be anything that will help you identify the advertising resource from which you did your promotion.

Please note that the keywords you will be appending is done freely. You do not have to add it anywhere inside your TrackThatAd.com back-office. For example, if you want to create a new email signature, just copy and paste your ad tracking url into your signature and append a keyword which could be emailsig to it. Your email signature might now look more or less like the example below:

Kind Regards
Your Name

For the best cat food visit the site below.
http://trackthatad.com/i/?i=3098/emailsig

You can append any keyword that comes to mind, just as long as it contains no spaces and has a maximum length of 30 characters. To sum up, rather than creating a new tracking url for every advertising resource you want to track, you may use just one and append different keywords to it for tracking different resources.

Getting back to our main statistics page, your page might now look more or less like the image below:

Notice that you now have a new entry where the "Tracking Url" columns show the address you are promoting and the campaigns column shows Campaign 1(Because we decided to name this campaign 1, remember). If anybody has clicked on your tracking link, the hits column will now reflect how many people has clicked or followed your tracking link.

The main statistics screen will give you a quick overview of how well any of your campaigns are doing. To see which advertising resources are giving you the best responses or getting the most clicks, just click on your campaign name to drill down into it for more statistics. This will bring you to a screen similar to the image below

Let's go through what you see above line by line. On the first entry you will notice the keyword "default". Our system will automatically assign this keyword if somebody clicks or follows your default tracking url with no keyword appended.

Entry number two shows that you got 1 hit from ForumABC where you placed an ad and entry number 3 shows that the email signature we created a few steps back also got one hit.

Also, please take note that a keyword will only appear on this page if somebody has actually clicked on it or followed it, so if you know you promoted your website with your tracking url and appended the keyword "Test1" to it and it does not show up on your resources statistics screen, it simply means that nobody has clicked or followed your link

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