Introduction to ad tracking

Why do you need one if you do any sort of marketing online or offline? Because you will need to know where your customers came from and if the bought something or not. This way you will be able to shut down the campaigns that are not working and are only causing you to lose time and money.

To explain it simple; you have placed an ad in someone’s newsletter, now you want to know how many saw your ad, how many clicked on it and of course how many did really buy something. And this is what the ad tracker do, it will give you a very detailed statistic (depends on what kind of software or service you use) about the traffic that is related to your ad that you placed in the ezine.

The two most important things to make note of is the content you use and where you place your ads. This is often the factors that can make or break your advertising campaigns. You have to test, test and keep testing until you know that the ad is the best one possible out there for your product or service. Important to know is that the market is always changing, so remember to not set and forget you ad as soon as it looks perfect. From time to time you will want to check it out and watch how it is still doing, you might have to do some changes as the market in your specific area changes.

So what are the difference between software and a service?

If you go for the software option which is the one recommended, you will have to install a script on your server, you can find some pretty good free ad tracking scripts out there, but if you are serious about your marketing, spend a few dollar and get a quality script with support and free installation on your server.

If you don’t like to install and use a script on your own server or you don’t have a website at all, but do affiliate marketing the easy way, then you would go for a paid or free ad tracking service. You will not have some of the important functions as your own domain name in the URL, but they still offer many of the same tools as a script installed on your own server.

So you have everything up and running, what now?

Start testing, change ONE word or sentence each time, do not change the whole article or ad at once, do small changes until you are satisfied with the results.