I didn't recall that my product sales were unusually high that day, however. On review, I saw that my sales were almost double average number, but nothing extraordinary - and certainly not four times greater.

It took me a little while, but I finally figured out what happened to cause this huge spike in traffic and my advertising costs that day.

On one hugely popular keyword that receives several million searches at Overture in any given month, I usually try to maintain third position, as opposed to first. Past experience has taught me that third position has a much better conversion to sales rate than top spot.

In order to get and maintain a third place position, I bid 36 cents, which was just a penny lower than second highest bidder.

Bidding in this manner flies in face of conventional pay per click strategy, which suggests that I should bid one cent higher than next LOWER bidder, or 24 cents in this case. However, conventional strategy allows competitor in 4th spot to raise their bid by just 2 cents to regain his or her third place standing. Using my method, he'd have to bid thirteen cents more to gain placement above my listing.

Second, Marketing is over all process you use to promote your products and/or services. This includes advertising, but is in no way limited to advertising. Again theme here is not to talk about marketing techniques, but method's you can use to track their success.

The very nature of Internet provides you with a variety of unique tracking methods. At it's very simplest you can produce 10 separate web pages to advertise in 10 different forums.

EXAMPLE: You have a page selling widgets you want to do a banner campaign with 10 different banners. You can create 10 mirror pages i.e. Widgets.html, Widgets1.html, Widgets2.html etc, etc.

In this way a different URL is associated with each of different banners you send out and your able to track which banner is producing most traffic from 10 identical sites..

There is a much simpler and less time intensive way however, to achieve that exact same result.

You have your index page and rather than mirroring it 10 times you simply add ?Widgets1 , ?Widgets2, ?Widgets3, etc, etc, to URL.

TEST IT HERE:

http://NetServeInt.com

http://NetServeInt.com/?index1

http://NetServeInt.com/?index2

http://NetServeInt.com/?index3

Even though same page is served up to your visitors, your server logs treat it as 10 different pages!

You can use this method to track any type of campaign not just banners. If you were to advertise in a publication such as this one, (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BY THE WAY) as well as others using same URL in all of them, you would have no way of knowing that 80% of traffic produced from those ad's came from here. If however you used a different URL ?index2, ?index3, etc, etc. You would know which ad drew how much traffic.