How to Track the Performance of your Footer/Sidebar Link Advertising Campaign?

The link advertising in the footer/sidebar of the WordPress themes has proven to be an effective way in promoting your sites in two ways. Not only will you get direct traffic from the blogs’ visitors who click on your footer link, it’ll also increase your site’s link popularity, hence your search ranking.

When you sponsor (you buy a footer/sidebar link) a WordPress theme, the more users download a theme, the more sites will have your links. Currently, there are 3 advertising models available in the market.

Model 1
You sponsor a theme and your links will be permanently placed on the theme. The theme will be promoted via submission to forums and theme directory sites.

Model 2
You sponsor a theme and your links will be permanently placed on the theme. The theme will be promoted via submission to forums, theme directory sites as well as the website of the theme owner.

Model 3
You sponsor a theme and your links will appear on the theme until a certain number of downloads have been fulfilled.

Now the question is: how do you know if your investment returns good results? To answer that question, you need to know 2 things.
1) How many times the theme have been downloaded?
2) How many websites use the themes?

The first question is actually redundant because ultimately, you want to know the answer to the second question, which is the end results! Therefore, when a theme owner tells you how many downloads you’ll get by sponsoring their theme as compared with others, think beyond the number of downloads because the big downloads don’t necessary mean that more sites are using the theme.

You’ll be surprised it is extremely easy to know how many domains use the theme that you sponsor. There is a catch, however, that you need to keep in mind before taking up a sponsorship. Just follow the steps below…

Step 1
Before sponsoring a theme, think of the anchor text that you are going to use. For example, you want to use this anchor text: Quality Travel Agent

Step 2
Think of the full keywords that’ll appear in the footer. For example, you want to use these keywords in the footer: Offered by Quality Travel Agent (note that “Offered by” is just text while “Quality Travel Agent” is the anchor text with your URL)

Step 3
Do an EXACT search on Google for those keywords. In this case, key in: “Offered by Quality Travel Agent” (include the quotation for exact search)

You need to make sure that no results can be found by Google using those keywords. You’ll see this in the Google’s result page:
No results found for “offered by quality travel agent”.

If the keywords return some results, go to Step 4

Step 4
Change the keywords and do the EXACT search again until no results can be found. Some examples would be:
In collaboration with Quality Travel Agent
Sponsored by Quality Travel Agent

Step 5
Ask the theme owner to add the keywords exactly what you want it to appear in the footer/sidebar. In this case: Offered by Quality Travel Agent

Step 6
When your link ad is up, wait for about a week and do the exact search for the keywords again and see how many web pages have been indexed by Google that contain your links. Copy the web pages and save them in Microsoft Excel. From there, you’ll know how many domains are using the theme with your link ad.

Step 7
The number of pages using the theme will increase with time so you need to do the search every week until the number stabilize.