Tracking your advertising performance is an essential tool to developing a successful pay-per-click revenue business. Whether you're tracking a change to your advertisement layout, or simply trying to keep track of your growth over time, tracking will allow you understand exactly what's happening with your ad revenue and can help you in the long run.

Many articles will encourage you to track your statistics, but they never describe what it is you need to track and how to track it. As it turns out, there are several forms of tracking, and each serves a unique and important purpose.

Before we get into specifics I want to comment on one thing: being a stickler for day-today performance of your advertisements isn't going to help you. While it would be nice to see an improvement each and every day, the truth is that advertising revenue can vary wildly day to day.

• Trend-spotting. The first use of tracking is trying to see trends develop. By learning how to spot a long-term trend you can either help promote its growth, or stop its decline. Trend-spotting isn't easy because day-to-day activities can fluctuate wildly, but by looking at long-term data (such as month to month) rather than short-term you can more easily spot trends.

• Proper testing. Everyone should test and tweak their advertisements. Blending is a good start, but finding the perfect combination of colors and positioning in order to maximize your revenue. The only way to eventually find what works best is to test, monitor, track, and repeat.

• Overall performance. Many publishers do not keep track of their overall performance over the course of time. Most of them will compare each payment to the previous one and smile if it's larger, or frown if it's smaller. Comparing paychecks is the wrong way to monitor your performance! Instead, you should track your payments over a long period of time: Simply graph each payment you receive and monitor your revenue over the long term. By monitoring your long-term performance you can determine if your overall revenue is growing or shrinking.

By properly tracking and paying close attention to your revenue over the long term you gain another priceless weapon in the advertising revenue wars. You'll be better prepared for the down times, and will be able to better promote your high times.