If you have been in the business of online marketing for a while, you know the importance of tracking anything and everything. Marketers don’t like to fly blind, and that’s exactly what you would be doing if you didn’t track your advertising links. That includes your affiliate links as well. Many newbies just grab affiliate codes from their affiliate programs and post them on their blogs or websites. While you can track a lot of things with Google Analytics, it’s always nice to have a way to figure out how many times each link on your website has been clicked and by whom.

Think about it. Let’s say you have acquired a sponsored link on a top blog or website. You don’t want to just look at the number of people who have come to your website. You also want to know the referring URL for those links and maybe the number of impressions it has gotten as well. Besides, you want to make sure you can break-down your data all the way back to each individual link.

If you happen to run your landing pages on WordPress, you can always use tracking plugins such as Redirection to gain all kinds of insight to who has visited your links and from where. You can also use services such as bit.ly to track your link, their progress on social media sites such as Twitter, and much more .

At the end of the day, whether you are an affiliate marketer or own a business online, you want to make sure you have all the data you need to analyze your campaign performances and make decisions accordingly. The last thing you want to do is leave things to chance.