Everything you need to know about Ad Tracking Software
By Lars Rohde

If you do any type of selling or marketing online it is essential that you do ad tracking all your advertising campaigns, this is the only way you will know the winners from the losers.
We have taken a closer look at the ad tracking software and it benefits and down pits compared to ad tracking services

How does the sales tracker mechanism work? To track performances of all your advertisements, you have to simply place the 'tracking' URL provided by the sales tracker program in your advertisement. When someone reads your ad on an ezine, say XYZ, and clicks on the tracking URL, which you have placed in this ezine, the visitor will be taken to your website and the ad tracking system will register that the click came from the XYZ ezine.

Now there are two types of ad trackers. The first is tracking software and the second is tracking service. The tracking software basically follows the mechanism described above. It helps you to generate specific web address for each campaign. In case you are using ad tracking software, the visitor can not directly go to your website. Instead their browser passes through a program installed in your web server, an additional counter is created for that address and then only the browser reaches your page.

The software will help you get all the stats via your browser any time with full details. With ad tracking software, it is possible to set up more than one tracker. Ad tracking software will help you to locate the ROI (return on investment) of your pay per click listings. It will also generate reports on the performances of the autoresponders, exit pop-ups, article, affiliate, ebook and reciprocal links, and newsletter, banner and off-line ads.

If you want to use ad tracking software you will need to make a one time investment to get decent software which often also includes free installation on your own server, carrying your domain name. If you do choose free software which normally has less functions and no support you will have to install it yourself. If you don't know how to do this, you will need to find someone who can help you, often this is a $10-$50 job depending on the software.

There are certain advantages of ad tracking software. If you are using software, you need not be dependent on another service provider company. Dependence on service provider may make you handicapped in certain events like when their site goes down or the company shuts off etc.
On the other hand, using a software requires your site to provide several system resources like disk space for program and tracking files and so on. Then in case of program up gradations, the software needs to be re-installed once again.

If you are not confident enough about handling the technical complexities of installation of software, your best option is to go for ad tracking services, where the whole operation is taken care of by a third party for a nominal fee, or you can use a free ad tracking service.

It doesn't matter if you do pay per click ads, articles pop ups, e-books, email marketing, affiliates, newsletters, reciprocal links, site links, banner ads or surveys, always use an ad tracker.

TIP: Setup an ad tracking survey on your site, it will collect information on what your customers want you to offer them.