Tracking ad campaigns online

If you advertise your business online, whether it’s through pay per click search engines, banners, or newsletter ads, tracking your ad campaigns is vital to your ultimate success.

You have spent a lot of time, money and effort on your ads. Without tracking their performance, you will have no idea why your campaign ultimately succeeds or fails or what is working with your campaign and what isn’t.

Once you have learned the basics of ad tracking, you can use it to tweak your ad campaigns, do comparison testing, and try out new advertising ideas on a small scale to test the waters before investing too much time or money on a full-fledged campaign. In effect, an ad tracking service, such as AdWatcher.com, will not only tell you how your current campaigns are currently doing, but will also help you improve your campaign in the future.

How Ad Trackers Work

Ad trackers are online services that monitor all of the visitors that come to your website through your advertising campaigns and track any actions they take or orders they make. They operate by placing code on the confirmation page on your website that comes up when a visitor purchases something or commits an action. They also place a cookie on the visitor’s computer, in order to track further and future behavior and visits to your website by that unique visitor, so that you can track repeat buyers as well.

Most of these services are fairly easy to use (e.g. AdWatcher.com comes with a free installation), so even if you have limited technical skills, you can still take advantage of them and track your online advertising. These can be especially useful if you are running comparison ads (perhaps the same ad on various PPC search engines, such as Google and Yahoo) to ascertain which source is providing you with the best traffic. They also allow you to experiment with tweaking ads, prices, landing pages, and many other aspects of your campaign to learn what converts best.

What You Should Be Tracking

Although there are a multitude of aspects of your ad’s performance that you should be tracking, there are some things are essential for you to know in order to judge whether your ad campaign is effective.

The main statistics you should track are:

• Number of Clicks
• Number of Sales
• Number of Actions
• Total Value of Sales
• Cost of Campaign
• Total Profit
• Cost Per Click
• Cost Per Sale
• Cost Per Action
• Return On Investment

One of the most important items to track is the Return on Investment (ROI), which takes into account all your costs and compares that to the profit you made from the ad to come up with a percentage that indicates how successful your ad has been. Ad trackers will provide you with this information to allow you to evaluate your campaigns on their overall performance.

Aside from simply tracking sales, these tools can also track actions that visitors take while they are on your website, such as subscribing to your online newsletter, joining your mailing list for website updates, and many other actions that a visitor may have taken without actually making a purchase.

Keep in mind, that your involvement is crucial at this stage. You need to review the reports generated in order to see what is working and what is not working, as well as constantly challenge yourself and try to improve the conversions.

Don’t be surprised if there are differences between your advertising outlet reports and those of a third-party tool. The results will almost certainly differ from each other. This does not mean that anything is wrong or that any service is not performing correctly or adequately, but rather that each party uses their own algorithms to calculate the data. If the differences are relatively small (between 5% to 10%), you shouldn’t be too concerned.

However, if you see large differences in the data provided to you, it is time to investigate further by questioning the results with your cus tomer service representative or with the supplier of the ad-tracking tool you are using to discover the cause of the discrepancy.

Conclusion

One really can’t overemphasize the importance of tracking the results of your PPC advertising campaigns. If you don’t track what your visitors are doing on your website, how many visitors came to your site through a particular ad campaign, how many visitors convert into buyers, your ROI, etc., you cannot be certain if a particular ad campaign is worth continuing or not.

Investing $20-25 per month into an ad tracking service, such as AdWatcher.com, can be one of the most profitable decisions you ever made for your business. The service is simple to use, extremely flexible, and can track the performance any form of online advertising. And right now, AdWatcher is even running a promotion where you can try it free for 30 days and get $150 in Pay Per Click credits on 5 major search engines. Check it out here.

Copyright notice

This tutorial is copyrighted by Klemen Stirn. Obtain permission before copying, re-publishing or otherwise redistributing this article.