Tracking Your Advertisements

Just as every business must advertise, all advertisements must be tracked. Once you start an advertising campaign, it becomes necessary to know which form of advertising is giving results and which is not so you can concentrate on the best ones and discontinue the non-performing ones.

You need to know which ad has brought you visitors.

Are they coming from

a banner ad
a newsgroup ad
a signature tag
a published article
a free link posting
an autoresponder campaign
a reciprocal link
an affiliate program
a free classified ad
an ezine ad
a forum posting
an email marketing campaign

Wouldn't you like to know

which of your ads received the best response
whether free classified sites are worth the effort
which websites were most profitable
which ezines are the most profitable
how a sponsored ezine ad compares to the standard one
whether animated banners are better than static ones
does the ad at the start of an ezine outperform the one at the end
and so on

For all these reasons, you need to track your advertisements.

How to track advertisements?

The best way to track ads is to use an ad tracking software or tracking service. Some results can be achieved by using other methods listed below, but they are insufficient.

Using an Ad Tracker: Using an ad tracker is very simple. You will only need to change the URL of your website with the 'tracking url' given by your ad tracker. 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).

An ad tracker may be a software that you can purchase for your use or a service for which you can pay monthly or yearly.

Using a Website Stats Program: You will need to install a website stats program like AwStats or Webalizer which will help you analyze where your traffic is coming from. Most web hosting packages offer a stats program along with the hosting.

Using Advertising Stats: When you advertise, some websites will give you daily, weekly, monthly statistics of your advertisement. These stats will enlist the number of ad impressions and click-throughs you receive. However, not all websites provide this facility.

Using different URL's: Every time you place an advertisement, you can use a different url to advertise. The unique URL will redirect visitors to your main page. But this method gets tedious when placing a number of ads.