One of the frustrations of online marketing is getting an integrated picture of how effective your marketing efforts are, especially which are the traffic sources are working effectively.

I’d given off up some off-the-shelf free and paid software and decided to develop my own tracking system a couple of months ago. Besides getting a better picture of what’s working and what’s now in promoting my own products and affiliate/CPA offers, I’ve decided to offer my in-house link management and tracking system. I believe new and intermediate level marketers who don’t have their own tracking systems in place, or are doing a lot of redirects manually are going to see a productivity boost out of this.

Introducing: Smart Link Manager

What it is:

• Creates different types of redirect links (301 redirects, iframes, meta refreshes, double meta refreshes and cloaked links)
• Option of creating keyword-optimized redirects or with a random structure (minimizes the footprint)
• Web stats, including referring URLs, geographical location, browser type
• Option of setting up CRON jobs to email you your campaign stats on your preferred schedule

Recovering profit in real time: Some CPA (cost per action) offers may hit their caps or may be redirected to other offers. Being able to edit, update and control which offers you’re promoting from one central location, with changes made in real-time are a major boost. No more scrambling to update multiple traffic sources/networks. Do it from ONE location. No more “offer not found” headaches, resulting in lost sales and profit.

Integrated marketing: This tool was created for traffic promotion types like article marketing, social bookmarking, blogging, forum promotion, social networking (squidoo, hubpages), video marketers. Having one universal tracking URL saves you the hassle of creating multiple links to track different channels.

I’ve also used the tool for PPC and PPV marketing and it scales without any issues even if you’re sending bucketloads of traffic through the script.

Some technical details:

• You need your own webhosting account
• PHP5 support and ioncube support are required
• Fantastico/cPanel admin interface would make setting up MySQL databases and CRON jobs a whole lot easier

I’m not a coder by any means, so I’ve documented the process from installation, setup, configuration, campaign launch and optimization. I’ve also written a marketing guide on techniques to integrate Smart Link Manager into existing or new campaigns.

Here’re some other reasons why Smart Link Manager is a great tool:

• It’s evolved from an in-house tool, and we’re running live campaigns using the script now.
• It’s self-hosted, so all the data resides on your own server. Your data remains yours.
• Constant upgrades: In the course of running campaigns, we make enhancements to the script constantly. You’ll get regular updates (we expect one upgrade each month).
• Low resource utilization: Whether you’re using a shared webhost or a dedicated server, the script has been designed from scratch to be reliable and scalable, even if you’re running a high volume traffic campaign.

The greatest advantage in using Smart Link Manager on a daily basis is that it creates redirects, incorporate tracking and cloaking within seconds, shaving a lot of manual work and getting the links correct each time (perfect for copying-and-pasting links). An easy-to-use, intuitive web-based interface makes campaign setup a snap.

Launch offer: You can get about 40% off the $47 price by using promotion code “WIAWPROMO” to get it for just $27 (limited to 20 buyers).

Be sure to check out: Smart Link Manager