Several Ways Of Online Ad Tracking

Are you in any kind of web- business? Then you have to take recourse of the online advertisements to expand your business. And all online marketing efforts are incomplete without the use of ad trackers. Ad trackers will let you know the size of the traffic a particular campaign has been able to generate and also how many clicks ultimately were converted into sales. You will find the most important use of tracking in running and managing affiliate programs. Tracking is being used by all kinds of e-business today. No matter what kind of business you are running on web, you will find a range of tracking methods suitable for your type of business. Each method comes with its unique advantages and disadvantages. Let's describe the basic features of some of the most important tracking methods.

Hit Counters: It is the ideal method to be used by the webmasters who just want the information as to how many times a particular page has been visited. Placed at the bottom of the page, the hit counter registers the 'hit' every time a visitor enters the page. However, this method provides only limited information.

Direct URL Tracking: If you have a single-page sales site, you can consider using this method to track sales on your website. This tracking method is effective for tracking only the immediate sales. It can not identify the visitors that visited the website through a particular referral and came back later to make a purchase. In this method, the affiliate ID in the URL is always visible, and it entails the risk of link piracy.

Cookie Tracking: It is by far the most popular method of ad tracking. Cookies are small text files that are written to a user's browser whenever an affiliate's link is clicked. Thus the referral gets stored in cookie and is recognized at the order page. And affiliate is credited for the referred sales. Not only they are simple to be read on any form, they are stored until commissions are rewarded to the referring affiliate. This way, affiliates are rewarded for the immediate purchase as well as the purchase made latter but within a specified period.

CGI/URL Tracking: it is a Perl or JavaScript enabled method that track the visitor right from the affiliate site to the merchant's site until the visitor reaches the order page. In this page, the affiliate ID is detected from the URL string. The Perl or JavaScript catches the affiliate ID by reading the current URL, and passes it on to the URL of the next page. It requires skilled design to maintain every link within the merchant's site. If the script fails, the merchant's site will also fail. This method helps in tracking the customers who have disabled their cookies. So it used to be employed as a backup to cookie tracking. But it is no longer effective to be used that way, as the end users can easily remove the affiliate ID from the URL and re-enter the site. In that case cookie tracking does not come to any help.

Self Replicated Pages: In this method, affiliates create their web pages on a template provided by the advertiser and these pages can be found in the directories at the merchant's website. It has been proved to be a reliable and effective method.

The motto of ad tracking in the end is not only counting on the hits, but how many hits have actually transformed into sales leads. Several ways of tracking help you to analyze the effectiveness of different marketing approaches and which of them bring the most profitable results for your company.