One of the big keys to success in the Internet Marketing game, in my humble opinion, is monitoring and measuring your business. This means tracking your numbers.

The phrase "Tracking Your Numbers" seems to be rather daunting to many folks just getting started in IM and affiliate marketing. But it's actually not all that hard to do.

There are three components to tracking your numbers. One, knowing what to track. Two, setting up a system to track. Three, interpreting the results.

Without getting into overwhelming detail, here are a few of the key numbers you should be tracking to establish and monitor the health and growth of your business:

1) Number of clicks on any ads, links in articles and links in forum posts you have.

2) Number of impressions for any ads, links in articles and links in forum posts you have. With ads on the PPC networks (Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter, etc.), this number is easy to determine. With links in articles and forum posts, you may not be able to get an accurate measure of this number. That's OK. You can work around this.

3) CTR (click through rate). This is the number of times a person clicks on your link or ad divided by the number of times the ad or link is viewed or displayed (number of impressions). If you aren't able to follow you number of impressions, you won't be able to determine this particular number, but don't despair. You can work around this.

These numbers can help you determine how successful your ads, articles and links are. Even if you can't get number of impressions, if you monitor number of clicks on each separate ad, article link and forum post link over time, you'll get a idea of what you can expect from each link. Follow each long enough and you'll be able to tell if your are getting better at writing ads, articles and forum posts as your click for each goes up in a given period of time (a week or a month for example).

4) Number of clicks on links (and linked images) on your landing page (or website).

5) Number of visits to your landing page (or website).

6) Number of unique visitors to your landing page (or website).

With items 4, 5, and 6 you can determine how many folks are visiting your website, how many clicks you get from folks visiting your website and how many of the folks visiting your website are new visitors or returning visitors.

These numbers can help you determine how successful your website links are.

If visitors come to your website but don't click on your affiliate link leading to your vendor's sales page, then the visitor number will be high and the click number will be low. This is an indication to work on your landing page.

If your visitor number is close to your unique visitor number, this means that almost all of your traffic is from new visitors and you are not getting repeat visitors. For a single page website like a landing page, this pattern is common. But for a content-rich website intended to attract an on-going audience, this pattern is a good indication that you are not attracting a loyal audience interested in the content of your site. If you see this pattern for a content-rich site, you may need to reassess your visitors and tune your content to better serve your market.

7) Number of sales conversions.

This can be a tricky number for affiliate marketers to gather. None the less, this is a critical number to determine just how success your sales process is from beginning (ad, article link, forum post) to end (sale). Without this number, you are selling blind and may be spending time and money on sales efforts that are not converting.

There are tools to assist you with gathering each of these numbers. Google Analytics is an excellent free tool to use to begin gathering these metrics. You won't be able to gather all information through Google Analytics, but it is a great way to get started and to become comfortable with the idea of measuring and monitoring your IM and affiliate marketing business.

Best,

- Iggy, The Sexy Iguana

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