If after reading Eric's article you were scratching your head wondering how you could start measuring all that important stuff, I've got the perfect tool for you! I've been playing with ConversionRuler for the past three months and am pleased as punch at what I'm learning through it.

I have to admit that when I first tried to set it up on my site, I was one confused girl. I thought that all I needed to do was place the special coding tags they give you onto the pages of my site, and I would then start collecting information about my visitors and sales. When no data showed up in my reports, I really didn't feel like trying to figure it out, and pretty much forgot about it.

Luckily, the folks at ConversionRuler noticed that no data was being recorded through my account, and they emailed me to see if I needed help setting things up. I explained what I did, and they wrote me back (and also called) with the information necessary to get things working properly.

What I hadn't understood at first was that in order to track things properly, I needed to use special tracking URLs on the stuff I wanted to track.

So in other words, you generally would use ConversionRuler to track specific ad campaigns. You can easily use it to track PPC ad campaigns such as those you'd run with Google AdWords or Overture. All you have to do is assign a specific tracking URL with the parameters you want to track (the people from ConversionRuler will explain all that to you), and then -- boom -- you can start assimilating some important information about your campaigns.

I use it to track my measly AdWords campaigns, and it's been very helpful; however, for my purposes it's been even more useful for tracking my newsletter links.

Since this newsletter is text-only, it gets pretty tricky to track the links I put into it. You probably noticed that I often have ads for my "Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines" report in the newsletter. Before using ConversionRuler, I really didn't know which ads brought the most visitors to my site, and/or which of those visitors actually purchased my report.

Sure, I could count up the purchases that came in after the newsletter went out, and I could look at my log files to figure out the extra hits I got to the order page, but that really doesn't give me any solid information that I can put to good use.

What I do now is put a tracking code such as this on each specific ad link:

http://www.highrankings.com/seo-writing.htm?c1=email&source=seg

That tells me that the category (c1) is "email" and the source is the Search Engine Guide. (You just have to make up your own way of naming the links so that you can remember where they came from.)

I hate long URLs like that for the newsletter, so I set up redirects through my .htaccess file to use something shorter like highrankings.com/hra61. I like to track the position of the ad (first slot or second), and/or if I mention the report within an article, I remember to use a different tracking link.

So what information do I get out of this? Well, that's the cool part. I've been tracking my Nitty-gritty ads here since issue 054, and have learned a great deal. I know how many people clicked on a particular ad link, and also how many of them went on to purchase the report. This helps me figure out which ad copy works best.

There have definitely been some interesting discoveries. For instance, last week's ad brought in only 27 clickthroughs. Seems pretty pitiful, doesn't it? However, of those 27 that clicked, 7 of them bought the report! That's about a 26% conversion rate, which is not too shabby by any means. And yet with other ads, I've had 87 clickthroughs with the same 7 sales (8% conversion). I've noticed that I tend to get somewhere around 7 sales from my email ads each week, regardless of the clickthrough numbers, which is also interesting.

A couple of weeks ago, I tested an ad for the report that didn't really look like an ad. I sort of sneaked it into the content and even called it "Shameless Self Promotion" on the heading. (You can see it here.) Now, that one brought a ton of clickthroughs (213) compared to the usual ads I run, but only 3 sales (1.4% conversion). I'm guessing that's because it wasn't clear from the copy I used that you'd be clicking to something you'd actually have to pay for. So, I believe that many people checked it out, then saw it cost money and left. In my regular ads, I always put the $49 price tag right there so that people will know up front. This would account for the lower clickthrough rate. (Hey...I know you guys are cheap...I don't blame ya, I am too!)

I think this information shows that creating ads that are honest definitely works best. I can never understand those long sales letters that try to hide the price until the end. If something costs money, then let us know right away that it does and how much it's gonna set us back.

Another week I tried making a separate sales page to push my "combo" offer, which consists of my Nitty-gritty report and Karon's copywriting course. Again, I had no price in the ad, and again, this one got many clickthroughs (255), but only 2 sales (less than 1% conversion).

Can you see how valuable this info is? Now, I know not to waste space on those types of ads, and to stick with the ones that are converting. It doesn't matter how many people click the link, it's the conversions that make a difference, and that's what you learn with software such as ConversionRuler. (I'm testing a new ad today!)

I've also put tracking codes on my forum signatures, certain links within my site, and anywhere else that I can think of. I not only track my report sales, but my newsletter signups. It's cool to see how many signups I get from those things. I found that the big text link I put up on the top of my home page for my report gets tons of clickthroughs, and many sales have come through it. In fact, it has a 2.5% conversion rate. And of course, I can see how many people are signing up for my newsletter from my Google AdWords campaigns also.

You can learn more about this cool tool, and sign up for a free trial through my affiliate link here.

It's a little bit scary at first trying to figure out how to create your tracking links, but once you get things up and running, you'll find that you can track all kinds of things.

Be sure to see Part 2 of the ConversionRuler review.