Track Everything!
One of the most important things you can do as the owner of an online business is to test and track everything you do. Track the number of hits you receive at your gateway sites so you will be able to monitor how well each one performs.
Just think, you may well have paid out good money for the traffic source you used to generate the hits to your gateway links. Maybe it was free traffic but you spent a lot of time clicking for credits to create those hits.
If one gateway was consistently producing great results but another was very bad, wouldn’t it make sense to concentrate your money, time and effort on the performing gateway and divert your resources away from the under achieving one. You may want to tweak the poorly performing gateway site by using a different banner or text ad to link to it or you may decide that the particular gateway is just not
good enough to persist with.
The only way to be in a position to make these very important decisions is by tracking your results and monitoring your performances.
I personally use a very powerful commercial tracking tool in my day to day business. It has all the ‘bells and whistles’ and can insert pop-ups and timers etc. and many other technical functions that I find useful. There are many of them on the market, some not as good as others but I choose to use this particular one because it does everything I need a tracker to do and it allows me to send and monitor a huge amount of traffic for a reasonable fee.
However, for the purposes of running my own SFI business and keeping an eye on my SFI gateways, I use the
very adequate Hit Tracker:
https://www.sfimg.com/PowerTools/HitTracking
which can be found in the Power Tools section in the main menu.
It is a very basic tracking tool but it does what you need it to do, that is to say; it will tell you where your hits have come from and how many each gateway has received. If you go on to become more active online, then you may find that you need to get yourself a more complex tracker, but other than that, the SFI Hit Tracker is
really quite adequate.
To use the Hit Tracker you will need to set up your Key Codes:
https://www.sfimg.com/PowerTools/HitTracking
These are numbers that you choose to represent a particular traffic source that you will be subjecting your link to. You attach your code, which can be any number, (with a few exceptions which are codes numbered 1100 through 1200, and 1300, which are reserved for SFI corporate use ) to the gateway link that you want to use. The code is inserted immediately after your SFI ID number in the link with a ‘.’ (period, full stop, dot) separating them.
e.g. http://www.sfi4.com/11644897.500/FREE
where the .500 is the inserted Key Code.
The system will then recognize this particular from any other and will tell you how many hits it is receiving. It is then up to you to relate this information to a particular source, which means that you must keep a list of all your Key Codes and what traffic sources they refer to. Go HERE to read more.
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