Whenever you buy ads from other people, you need to know how effective your ad is, to be more specific, you need to know whether your ad makes visitor do what you expected them to do. Sometimes, just a visit from your ad is not what all you waned, you may want a little bit more than that. For example, you may want your users to sign up for newsletter or you may simply want the visitor to buy something from your site. You can mention how effective your ad is with the free Google Analytics. Here is the steps you can take:

First, determine the landing page of your ad placed on other sites, an example of be: http://www.yoursite.com/page1.php Then determine what your goal page is, this is the final page you want your visitors to go to, it could be http://www.yoursite.com/thank-you-for-purchasing.php. After you determined all these pages, put them into the conversion goal setting section, see the following image:

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After you have completed this step, then you need to determine a couple of things and build a understandable URL. For example, i want to buy a text link ads on SiteA, if you just use the link: http://www.mysite.com, you get nothing on Google Analytics, however, if you use the URL like: http://www.yourdomain.com/landingpage.html?utm_source=SiteA.com&utm_medium=textlinkads&utm_campaign=specialsale, then you would able to track the results. Google has a very handy tool to build a URL like this:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&topic=10998

On that page, it explains terms clearly such as what is the campaign source, campaign medium…etc

After you’ve done this, in Google Analytics, you can track the results by clicking traffic source and then select campaign names that you want to track. You can see how much traffic has a specific ad campaign brought to you and you can see how these traffic has contributed to your final objective (the goal you set up previously).

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