Which of the following links would you prefer to publish in your newsletter or ezine?

Link 1:
http://YourSite.com/php/scripts/somescript.php?productid=523&campaignid=10115&
affid=10345

(or)

Link 2:
http://YourSite.com/ct/products/monitors

If you published Link 1 in your newsletter, it would wrap to two lines, probably even break up, and no one may be able to click on it, but it looks long, unreadable and hideous!

Imagine a second link (Link 2 above) that goes to the same destination, is much shorter, looks nice and compact, and more than anything, is SEO friendly (meaning, no "?" or "&" characters in your link - much more human readable too!).

Let me give you another example. Let's say you have an affiliate link in your newsletter. Which of the following links would you prefer?

Link 1:
http://www.MoneyMakingSite.com/commissions/affid=1232

(or)

Link 2:
http://YourSite.com/ct/amazon/ipods

Now, Link 1 directly gives away the fact that it's an affiliate link, and your visitors or subscribers may never click on it. What's worse, they might just copy and paste the main link without your affiliate id, and there - you've lost yet another referral sale - and lost more revenue in affiliate commissions!

That's not all - it is downright UGLY! Either way, the chances of your link getting clicked just went from ZERO (when it was long and broken) to ... MINUS 2!

You've lost a potential visitor - a potential sale - a potential customer for life!

Of course, you could use those expensive 3rd party web sites which charge you anywhere between $25 upto $100 per month for this feature, plus a few other features that you will never need!

Or you could simply use ClickTracker.

Install ClickTracker on your own web server in under 10 minutes (including configuring your installation, and time to upload all files to your web site).

Your subscribers and visitors will then see only your domain name in all your links. Use the new SEO-Friendly URL feature. This promotes link popularity for your domain name, which is crucial in getting a higher rank among search results of extremely popular and widely used search engines like Google.com .

And the best part is that it is under 20 bucks! For $19.95, you simply cannot get a better deal on a better campaign management product.

Run Multiple Installations of ClickTracker on the same site

A new feature (TABLE_PREFIX = "ct") allows you to run multiple installations of ClickTracker on the same web site. So, if you have previously installed ClickTracker, those tables will have names that start with "ct_...". If you change this to"ctnew", then your old ClickTracker tables will not be touched, and all new ones will be created, with names
starting with "ctnew_...".

Create Campaigns

You can now group and categorize links using "Campaigns". A campaign can have multiple links. You can switch links between campaigns. You can also filter the statistics page by Campaign name.

Create Sub-Campaigns

If you have a link that looks like this:
http://YourSite.com/ct/5

You can now add sub-campaigns to this link on the fly

If you are not able to use the SEO-Friendly links, then you can create a new sub-campaign on the fly by simply adding a "@" symbol followed by some text to identify the sub-campaign.

For example, if you published the link http://YourSite.com/ct/5 three times in your newsletter - once right at the top, one in the middle, and one in your signature - you could add sub-campaign text to the same link as follows (SEO-Friendly version), and track which link was clicked on more:

http://YourSite.com/ct/5/top
http://YourSite.com/ct/5/middle
http://YourSite.com/ct/5/signature

If you are unable to use SEO-Friendly links for some reason (your web site is not running on Apache or doesn't have the Mod-Rewrite module installed) then the above 3 links above would look like the ones below:

http://YourSite.com/ct/t.php?l=5@top
http://YourSite.com/ct/t.php?l=5@middle
http://YourSite.com/ct/t.php?l=5@signature

You can also publish a short link on your web site on different pages, and track which one performs better:

http://YourSite.com/ct/5/index
http://YourSite.com/ct/5/buy
http://YourSite.com/ct/5/blog

If you used a nickname instead of the number ("5" in the example above) in the above links (see next section for details), they would look even more better, like this:

http://YourSite.com/ct/newsletter/index
http://YourSite.com/ct/newsletter/buy
http://YourSite.com/ct/newsletter/blog

Track links using a "nick" instead of a number

You can assign your links a nickname ex. "newsletter".

And now this link:
http://YourSite.com/ct/5

Now becomes...
http://YourSite.com/ct/newsletter

Of course, they are both essentially the same, and all clicks to both versions will still be attributed to a single link. Just that instead of having numbers in your links, you can use plain text to refer to your shortened links.

So the same link with the sub-campaign "top":
http://YourSite.com/ct/5/top

Now becomes...
http://YourSite.com/ct/newsletter/top

Cloaking Your Links

The ClickTracker also allows you to "cloak" the shortened links.

So, the shortened link:
http://YourSite.com/ct/5/top

Would be cloaked to look like this:
http://YourSite.com/dir/clicktracker.html

Where clicktracker.html is a cloaked page, that uses frames, and internally redirects to the actual shortened link (http://YourSite.com/ct/5/top). So, when someone clicks on the cloaked link, the link in the location window of your browser will still remain the cloaked URL, but the web site below will be showing the actual destination site of the shortened link.

Highly flexible, fully editable Campaigns, Links and Cloaked Links

All information is editable. You can easily edit (using the same familiar interface that you used to create them) the campaign info, link info, cloaked URL, keyword and notes for any of the links.

• PHP enabled web server (PHP is free - ask your web host - it is probably already available to you)
• MySQL database (MySQL is free too)
• If you want the SEO-Friendly URL Rewriting feature to work, then your web host must be running Apache with the Apache Mod-Rewrite module installed. Any cheap web host that offers Apache, PHP and MySQL is almost 99% certain to have this module installed. Check with your host, if not it is time to switch hosts to a better host.