Facebook's Location Tracking - Are We Ready For This?

With a stalling stock, and tough competition from peers, it seems Facebook is now getting a bit more than it bargained for. This probably explains why they're hard at work improving their service, and introducing more features such as Graph Search, video and voice calling, and some brand new marketing features, the list is long, but doesn't end there. Facebook is introducing a new location tracking feature, which will help Facebook friends who are nearby to connect to each other. Additionally, businesses will be able to reach out to customers and promote offers to users based on their location. Apparently, this is a big change. But are we ready for this kind of thing?Back in the days Facebook was born, there wasn't really much concept of a social media where people could connect and get together to form private circles, share life events etc. Back then, Facebook was one of the very few social tools for connecting. Fast forward now, and you'll see a plethora of such services waiting to be checked out. The social media user is no longer restricted to a few means of communication. There are so many other tools that directly (Google+, Twitter etc) or indirectly (Skype, WhatsApp, Instagram) compete with Facebook. Hence, the competition may be too much for Facebook to handle in the long run.Another trend that's been on the rise for the past few years is that of users going mobile. More and more people are now using mobile devices to surf the web. And an even higher percentage of social users use their mobile devices for socialising. According to Facebook's latest 10-K report, about half of its monthly active users are mobile users. This clearly points to the eventuality that Facebook will have to find mobile revenue streams as well, such as mobile ads, since around 85% of its income comes from advertisements. Facebook also seems to have lost some of its charm. According to a study, around 21% of its regular users are now too busy to log in as much. 10% think it's a waste of time, whereas another 10% have deleted or deactivated their accounts for long periods in the last year. This goes on to show that users are less and less interested in Facebook with the coming days - all the more reason for Facebook to enhance its features and bring life to itself.With the world going mobile, it's no wonder Facebook has decided to do the same with its location tracking feature. It bought a location tracking setup in the form of a social media known as Glances last year. And the year before that, Facebook acquired Gowalla, another location-based social media. Now, combining the efforts, Facebook has launched its own location tracking feature that is based on the push technology. Push notifications will tell Facebook when a user is at some place, and when his friends are nearby.Great mobile feature? Probably. But breach of privacy? Totally! Users were already agitated on the photo tag suggestion feature. So this new feature might just send the paranoid user into a frenzy. People don't want their location to be tracked, and their whereabouts be disclosed to a company that's made up its own little world out there? Besides, this new feature would be a heaven for stalkers, which I am sure none of us sane people want, do we?What do you think of these new features Facebook is so intent upon introducing? Would you like to be tracked socially? Answer with a yes or no in the comments below, along with a remark to let us know how the majority of you feels about this. Cheers :)Filed Under: Facebook, News

Qasim Zaib is a passionate blogger who enjoys writing articles on Technology, Make Money Online and Blogging niche. He is our Gold Star Contributor and co-author of all blogs under our network.

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FaceBook Conversion Tracking with LinkTrackr

FaceBook conversion tracking is a tricky issue, but if you’re planning to buy FaceBook ads then you’ll just burn a hole through your pockets without the correct tracking system setup.

FaceBook used to have it’s own conversion tracking system, but due to unknown reasons they had it shut down. Perhaps  they were worried that advertisers would start to realize just how bad their conversion rates are, and doubt the quality of their advertising platform. No real official reason was given though.

Till today FaceBook has not introduced a replacement to their native conversion tracking, so most marketers are spending blindly on FaceBok ads. This is surprising when you consider the fact that FaceBook Ads are often hyped up to be “the Google Adwords replacement”.

The good news is that you can easily track your FaceBook conversions with LinkTrackr. Unlike the defunct native FaceBook conversion tracking system however, LinkTrackr can also be used to track affiliate products you may be promoting. As long as your affiliate program supports pixel tracking or TID tracking, results should be accurate. You can read more about affiliate conversion tracking if you’ve never attempted to track affiliate sales before.

Here I’ll give you a step-by-step walkthrough on how to create your own FaceBook conversion tracking campaign.

FaceBook’s ad platform is different from Google Adwords. FB only tracks by campaigns and ads. They do not have “Ad Groups” to help you group together different ad targetting options.  Therefore you will need to create your own naming system if you want to implement your own FaceBook sales tracking.

To make things simple, whenever I start a new campaign, I name my first ad “FB001? and continue this incremental numbering system for all ads, like below:

To keep the data accurate, I just keep giving the ads a new number regardless of whether they were approved, or whether I paused / deleted them. Never use the same number twice.

Now that we have numbered each ad, create a new tracking link in LinkTrackr for the product or affiliate offer you want to promote, and enter that tracking link with the ad number as the campaign name. Example:

With this simple method, you will be able to see right away in your LinkTrackr dashboard the amount of clicks you get from each numbered ad. If you have an account that supports conversion tracking, you should also be able to see the sales and optins from the numbered ads.

The example above is when you’re running a single campaigns for a single product. If you’re running multiple campaigns, you need to append a campaign ID to your campaigns and in your tracking as well, for example:

http://gobala.linktrackr.com/trackingname-FB01AD01

This is my reference for campaign 01, ad 01. If you want to test more complex campaigns however you’ll need a spreadsheet to keep track of your numbering system.

The limitation with this method is that you cannot track how many “Likes” you got from the campaign. If your objective is to get more likes then advertise your FaceBook page instead. FaceBook will be able to tell you exactly how many Likes you got when you advertise a page or “sponsored story” with the default stats.

Like I said before, FaceBook conversion tracking is not easy and never will be until FaceBook intriduces a new conversion tracking for advertisers, but this method will work pretty well.

Tagged as: facebook, facebook ads, facebook conversion tracking, facebook conversions

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Amazon Affiliate Link Tracking Basics – Working With The Amazon Associates Program

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use Amazon affiliate links in your LinkTrackr account to track clicks and other important data. Getting a regular HTML link should be easy if you know the basics, but since Amazon now has tons of different product widgets and links it can be pretty confusing to a beginner.

Step 1: Login to your Amazon Associates account at http://affiliate-program.amazon.com and make sure you are working with the correct account. In the example above, I am working with the ID “classicguitar-20”.

Step 2: Enter the product name or search term and click on “Go”. Amazon will return a list of related products.

Step 3: Find the product you want, and click on the highlighted icon (not on “Get Link”). This is the easiest way to get a regular HTML link.

Step 4: How just highlight the raw HTML link as per the example above, and right click to copy the link. This is how the raw link looks like:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004R7A9NU/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=classicguitar-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B004R7A9NU

All raw HTML links should start with “http://www.amazon.com/…” – these are the only type of links that will work in LinkTrackr, PPC ad networks or any other link tracking software. It should also contain your Amazon affiliate ID.

Amazon also offers a short version of the link. The get it just click on “Shorten URL with amzn.to”

The shorten link is encrypted so you will no longer see your affiliate ID or any other variable like ASIN or the product name. It’s much easier to work with and the chances of making a mistake with your links a much lower.

If you click on “Get Link” in step 3 instead of the HTML link shortcut, you will be taken to the complete linking options page filled with all type of widgets and link formats. If you are on this page, you can choose the “Text Only” tab and manually copy the required HTML by highlighting only the link as shown above. However, unless you are very careful, it’s easy to make a mistake.

So we would recommend you just right click on the link preview and choose “Copy Link Address”. This is safer and actually much easier. With either method, the actual HTML link you get is the same.

Now login to your LinkTrackr account, click on “Add New Link” and fill up the form. The example above shows you how to do it by entering only the HTML link – no widget codes, no image or pixel codes, and no iFrame codes.

After creating the Link, make sure you test it out. When you click on your tracking link, it should take you directly to a page on Amazon.com. If you do not see a complete page, you have not done it correctly.

Common mistakes:

Entering the “iFrame” code into LinkTrackr. Your link will work but you will only see the iFrame widget and not the Amazon.com pageEntering pixel image codes.Not including “http” in your link

So we hope this Amazon tutorial has helped you understand how to get a regular Amazon affiliate link and use it within your LinkTrackr account.

Tagged as: affiliate link, amazon, amazon affiliate link

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FaceBook Conversion Tracking with LinkTrackr

FaceBook conversion tracking is a tricky issue, but if you’re planning to buy FaceBook ads then you’ll just burn a hole through your pockets without the correct tracking system setup.

FaceBook used to have it’s own conversion tracking system, but due to unknown reasons they had it shut down. Perhaps  they were worried that advertisers would start to realize just how bad their conversion rates are, and doubt the quality of their advertising platform. No real official reason was given though.

Till today FaceBook has not introduced a replacement to their native conversion tracking, so most marketers are spending blindly on FaceBok ads. This is surprising when you consider the fact that FaceBook Ads are often hyped up to be “the Google Adwords replacement”.

The good news is that you can easily track your FaceBook conversions with LinkTrackr. Unlike the defunct native FaceBook conversion tracking system however, LinkTrackr can also be used to track affiliate products you may be promoting. As long as your affiliate program supports pixel tracking or TID tracking, results should be accurate. You can read more about affiliate conversion tracking if you’ve never attempted to track affiliate sales before.

Here I’ll give you a step-by-step walkthrough on how to create your own FaceBook conversion tracking campaign.

FaceBook’s ad platform is different from Google Adwords. FB only tracks by campaigns and ads. They do not have “Ad Groups” to help you group together different ad targetting options.  Therefore you will need to create your own naming system if you want to implement your own FaceBook sales tracking.

To make things simple, whenever I start a new campaign, I name my first ad “FB001? and continue this incremental numbering system for all ads, like below:

To keep the data accurate, I just keep giving the ads a new number regardless of whether they were approved, or whether I paused / deleted them. Never use the same number twice.

Now that we have numbered each ad, create a new tracking link in LinkTrackr for the product or affiliate offer you want to promote, and enter that tracking link with the ad number as the campaign name. Example:

With this simple method, you will be able to see right away in your LinkTrackr dashboard the amount of clicks you get from each numbered ad. If you have an account that supports conversion tracking, you should also be able to see the sales and optins from the numbered ads.

The example above is when you’re running a single campaigns for a single product. If you’re running multiple campaigns, you need to append a campaign ID to your campaigns and in your tracking as well, for example:

http://gobala.linktrackr.com/trackingname-FB01AD01

This is my reference for campaign 01, ad 01. If you want to test more complex campaigns however you’ll need a spreadsheet to keep track of your numbering system.

The limitation with this method is that you cannot track how many “Likes” you got from the campaign. If your objective is to get more likes then advertise your FaceBook page instead. FaceBook will be able to tell you exactly how many Likes you got when you advertise a page or “sponsored story” with the default stats.

Like I said before, FaceBook conversion tracking is not easy and never will be until FaceBook intriduces a new conversion tracking for advertisers, but this method will work pretty well.

Tagged as: facebook, facebook ads, facebook conversion tracking, facebook conversions

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YouTube Conversion Tracking with LinkTrackr

Do you have a YouTube conversion tracking strategy?

If you’re like me, then you’re probably uploading product reviews, screen capture tutorials and other short videos on YouTube to promote your affiliate website or affiliate links. But how are your YouTube promotions really impacting your profits? Is YouTube really worth your time?

There’s no real way to know unless you implement a systematic way of tracking your YouTube clicks and conversions. And of course, you can do this easily with LinkTrackr.

The easiest way to do it is to embed your LinkTrackr tracking link right on the video page. On your video editing page, you can actually insert a short description of your video. Put your tracking link right up front followed by a short description as you can see below.

YouTube only makes a portion of your description visible, so make sure you enter the most important text right after the tracking link. Now your video display page will look like this:

When anyone shares your video URL on FaceBook, your YouTube tracking link will also be share and will be clickable (unless they just clicked on “Like”), as you can see below:

This will go a long way in helping you track clicks from your YouTube videos and shares, and also with your YouTube conversion tracking efforts.

However, this is only useful when someone views your videos on YouTube itself. It doesn’t appear when someone embeds your videos on their website. For that you need to work with “annotations”.

Annotations are another great way to implement YouTube conversion tracking, especially due to the fact that annotations appear on all embedded videos on any website or blog.

Since YouTube only allows you to link to other YouTube videos or pages, enter the full tracking URL as per the example below. It will not be click-able but at least you get to display the entire link. To make it even more effective you may also want to use domain name cloaking or cPanel link cloaking for shorter, easier to remember links.

Here are some other ideas to make your YouTube conversion tracking more effective:

Video Splash Screen – Create a 5-10 second introduction “splash screen” with your tracking link displayed on a plain background with some text, so viewers know where to go to get more information.Video Credits – Just like the splash screen, but at the end of your video. Make it play for 5-30 seconds so your viewers can actually remember or write down the URL.

With LinkTrackr’s dynamic campaign feature and TID conversion tracking feature (which is available in all accounts), I can clearly see how may people registered / opted in to my free webinar:

I can also see the conversion rate so I know exactly how effective YouTube is as a traffic source for my webinar. If I find that the traffic is too low quality, I may just decide to stop marketing this product on YouTube and turn my attention to more qualified and responsive traffic sources.

With the correct strategy, you will know for sure if your YouTube efforts are paying off or if your time is better spent elsewhere. So start tracking your YouTube conversion tracking campaign now!

Tagged as: conversion tracking, youtube, youtube conversion tracking

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