Ad Tracking Basics - Programs and Metrics

Why is there a need to track your ads? Tracking ads is a must in web marketing or optimization process. It helps website administrators see what ads are working and what ads remain dead. Knowledge of this is essential to identify what needs to improve in terms of advertising, promotion and marketing. Tracking will help you find better ways to improve your advertising results.

Ad Tracking

There are various ad tracking strategies that you can utilize. The “poor man’s” tracking method is free. How is this done? You should set up a separate landing page for every ad. Moreover, you should also allocate a separate SKU for every landing page. To find the click-through rate of each landing page, check your site’s traffic logs including your total sales. You can do this by seeing the number of SKU you have sold. Then you can work on the conversion rate and the marketing cost per sale.

Another way to do ad tracking is by means of tagging the url of the landing page. This is done by placing a code preceded by a question mark in the url. Remember that anything you place after a question mark will not cause any effect on the landing page that your visitors will see. The url with the tracking tag will appear in the site’s traffic logs.

Another way is to turn to ad tracking software that will allow you to track ad click through, visitors and sales. Some of the commonly used ad tracking programs include Overture’s Conversion Counter, Google AdWords conversion tracking, ProAnalyzer, ClickAlyzer, and much more.

Ad Tracking Formulas

To be able to track your ads effectively, you can use these ad tracking formulas:

Conversion Rate gives you relevant information and insights on the effectiveness of your landing page’s sales copy. You may have noticed that as you enhance your copy and the process, your conversion rate will also rise. Below is the formula:

Marketing Cost per Sale gives you considerable information that will help you determine which ads are doing good in terms of investments and which aren’t. This is useful in identifying which ad campaigns are needed to be scaled up. The formula is as follows:

Click-through Rate will show you how good and effective your ad is. The rate changes once you make some improvements on the ad.

Ad Tracking is what you need to avoid investing on ads which are useless. Furthermore, it gives you the chance to maintain and improve the better ads.

Are your ads helping your site or just damaging your budget? For more information on Ad Tracking and other web marketing services please visit our Tracking and Analysis Tools or apply for a free Website Analysis.