Ad tracking programs. New possibilities for advertisers.

Added: 03/30/2006

Advertisement is an expensive part of business activity with a high level of risk: companies have to ivest much money to promote their brends. Consequently, there appears an absolute necessity to keep an eye on the effectiveness of advertising your money are invested in. The best way to do this is to use the information, provided by ad tracking studies.

Ad tracking programs are one of the most powerful marketing tools to be found on the Net. Every internet marketing expert will tell you the very same secret of their success - they constantly track and test their results. When you use an ad tracker you can identify exactly where the hits to your web site are coming from, so that you can exclude all advertising that is not woking and use more ads that are making your profits. Every business must advertise. The more effective a company's ads, the greater its profits. There are two factors to make advertising more effective: 1. The content, t.e. the words used in a headline and the body; 2. The location, where your ad is placed. Specialists in marketing will tell that by constant experimenting, changing, testing you will finally find the best way to show advertising to the best advantage. But one thing will be missing...How do you carry out testing and know which ad has brought them to your web site. Visitors can be captured by a banner ad, newsgroup ad, signature tag, published article, affiliated program, forum posting, email marketing campaign, etc. It is necesssary to know which of these received the best response, whether animated banners are better than static ones, how effective your email signatures are... The only way to find it out and to really know the effectiveness of every single ad, link or banner is to use ad tracking programs. There exist 2 main types of ad tracking programs:
1. Tracking software, 2. Tracking services. Tracking software programs run at your own site. You purchase the program and it is installed on your site. The advantage of this software is that you do not depend on another company if their site work is ceased or the company folds. Your tracking URLs carry your own domain name. On the other hand, your site needs to provide disk space for program and tracking files. Tracking services run at the site of the supplier. You pay a rental for the program. In this case you do not require any software installation or adjust your system resources. But choosing tracking services you become dependent on the supplier company.

The principles of operating ad tracking programs are simple:

you don't have to change anything at your web site
you don't have to examine your web site logs
you don't have to make copies of your web pages
You just replace the URL that you want to place in your ad with a 'tracking' URL which the ad tracking program will give you.

Let's have an example. Suppose you want to run an ad campaign by placing an ad in the ABC newsletter for a product at your web page http://www.yoursite.com

You first decide on a special code unique to this campaign, in this case a code "ABC" would be suitable. Then you just tell the ad tracking program to provide you with the tracking URL for http://www.yoursite.com with a code ABC As simple as that, you just feed in 2 pieces of information. (The beauty of ad tracker programs is that you can set these up in seconds). The system then provides you with a new URL - a tracking URL - and this is the one that you place in the ad. So now when someone reads that ad and clicks on the new URL they will be taken to http://www.yoursite.com and the ad tracking system will register that the click came from the ABC newsletter. What information does an ad tracking program provide ?
At the basic level an ad tracking program records when your URL has been clicked. It can detect where your visitor came from (the referring URL), the browser and operating system and the exact time. It can record total hits and unique hits (i.e. where one visitor may click several times). This data is kept in the system so you can then pull off reports on any ad campaign over any period e.g. by month, day or even by hour. You can go online at any time and view your stats, which will be immediately up to date. If someone clicked on your ad just a second ago this information will already be available in the system.

The campaign management tools built into ad tracking programs enable advertisers to quickly shift their budgets to ads that deliver the best results.

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