Ad Tracking Website

Shouvik Mazumder asked:




What Is An Ad Tracker?

You place a classified ad with a link to your site in an e-zine. the ad tracker tells you the response from that ad, i.e.the number of people who clicked through your site from that ad.

Why You Need To Track Your Ad?

Businesses who track their advertising are able to tell how well a particular ad was received which can help them to maximize their profits. Expert internet marketers will tell you that it is absolutely necessary to constantly experiment, change, tweak or test your ad. An ad tracker program make all these processes extremely easy. Ad tracker program shows you how much traffic is coming from where. It also shows you IP and time logs from each source, or you can know whether or not you are being cheated on traffic.

What Are The Different Things That You Can Check With An Ad Tracker Program?

An ad tracker can effectively check and display:

1) Basic visitor stat (user browser type, operating system, ip address, referring url etc)

2) Return visitors (i.e visitors who again visit your site). This visitors have special interest in the theme of your site.

3) What action visitors are taking (like clicking on links,downloading e-books etc)

4) Remote site tracking (what are your visitors doing in your affiliate site/sites)

5) Keyword search — which keywords are people entering into engines to find your site?

and more….

How An Ad Tracker Works?

Setting up an ad tracker program is not difficult.
You first need to setup an ad campaign. after that you need to go to your ad tracker control panel to view the stats.
The ad tracker program will run at your own site, or if, you are using an external service it will run on a tracker site.

For setting up the ad campaign, you need to cloak your site with the ad tracker url.
say your site is http://www.yoursite.com and your site code in your ad tracker program is xxxxx
Then you will be given an ad tracker url like
http://www.exampletrack.com/a.cgi?a476&xxxxx for your use.

If anybody clicks at your ad tracker URL, he will be redirected to your site. And as soon as he does click the ad tracker URL, his stats are automatically inserted in the control panel of your ad tracker program which you can view by logging in to your ad tracker program account.

Where You Can Place Your Ad tracking URL?

classifieds

e-books

article submission directories/e-zine directories

auctions

discussion lists and discussion boards

paid per click search engines

Pop Up Ads

Reciprocal links

signature files

etc…………

Auto Responders Have Their Own Ad Tracking Program
One of the big benefits of using auto responders is that they all have their own ad tracking facilities.

What Can Be Your Next Steps After Tracking The Ads?

Since you know which sources are producing and which ones are not, it is easy to identify which ones you should drop. The truth is, you will find that there are at least a few ads that are not making the results. Drop the ones that don’t do well, and cut your ad budget but not your profits!
After you have dropped the poor producers, you can spend more with those bringing in the best results. If you can spend one dollar to make three dollars, so why not increase the amount of times you do ad tracking?

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Daniel Bernal asked:




Call tracking in 2010 promises to be even more fluid and responsive than it is today. As a performance monitoring system for multiple ad campaigns launched on the internet, radio, press or other forms of media, call tracking has evolved at lightning speed since the initial introduction into the internet marketing equation in the 1990’s.

Originally tracking calls was a complex and expensive benefit only provided to enterprise level corporations by advertising agencies as a way to monitor the return on the investment made in marketing and advertising promotions on the internet. The scope of the process was limited to situations where code could be embedded in the acknowledgment page resulting from a click event that could be counted as a direct result of the ad. The data collected still needed to be compiled in a meaningful way before it was useful for determining the effectiveness of the promotion vehicle. Today there is a large number of call tracking service providers offering call tracking services online at rates as low as $25 per month for basic call tracking plans.

During the last few years the advancements in technology and integration of hardware and collaborative software pieces has changed the boundaries of call tracking. The origination of telephone contact, which is the source of 75 to 90 percent of small business sales leads, can now be tracked from on or offline sources through current tracking methodologies. Facebook, Google Pay Per Click, MySpace, associate links, and browser searches can all be identified as the specific source of the contact made by a consumer. Keyword association to the specific telephone number called ties the ad campaign to the conversion of an inquiry. All this information is automatically entered into a central database along with the customers’ name, phone number and item of interest when the telephone call is connected. No human interaction is needed for the information to be accurately recorded and saved for future reference and analysis. The most recent advancement is the development of modules that automatically funnel the raw data collected into analytical software programs that produce reports on the performance matrix for any number of ad campaigns being run.

In addition to the original function as a marketing measurement tool, this service has become a key in a variety of customer service and retention programs. The tracking systems central database can be accessed by all authorized customer service representatives to facilitate in resolving customer service issues quickly and effectively. Having a customer’s complete history on screen the moment a call is received makes the interaction between the customer service representative and the client immediately positive in nature. Monitoring of CSR and client calls to assure quality in service is another advantage. These are a few of the advances a tracking system can bring to customer service.

The future of call tracking may take root in areas currently unthought of but as young software engineers continue to improve on the features currently being used they will undoubtedly be inspired with ideas for new applications.

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Diane De Silva asked:




There are umpteen numbers of ads sent by companies through the internet. It is because the internet is a medium which offers advertisers, small or big, the same tools and services. But, some of these advertisers make use of these tools wisely while others overlook certain benefits.

Ever wondered why some of your ads became extremely popular while others fizzled out without any significant results? They might have been advertising the same product, but one of them clicked while the other flopped.

Analysts have been racking their brains to give an explanation. They studied various ads by tracking the response of the viewers to the ads and drew many interesting conclusions.

They found that certain key aspects were present in successful ads which made them click with the viewer. The failed ads didn’t contain these aspects. Interested in finding out what these aspects are?

Here are the two most important conclusions derived after comparing three ads of similar nature:

Personalized headers
Sending e-advertisements, through e-mail, with the subject’s name generated more interest than those without it. You can also ensure that the headings are short and sweet. If it is long, it doesn’t keep the viewer engrossed for long.

In some cases, viewers felt that personalized headings did cause a sense of doubt and caution as it was sent by a stranger. But, in most cases, it aroused their curiosity. They also accepted the sender more courteously and were willing to listen to what the sender had to say.

Use of Bullets
Avoid writing long paragraphs and elaborating on your products. Keep it short. Bullets were found to be the best way to make the ad pleasing to the eye. If bullets aren’t possible, the use of short paragraphs is recommended.

Bullets also help to add emphasis to your ad. It was found that the prospects’ likelihood of signing up for your product was more when bullets were present and the ad was simple and specific, sans unnecessary information.

While the above two inferences will help to make most ads more attractive, it can’t help all ads become successful. This is because these ads belong to a particular group.

To find out how to make your ad a super successful one, it is imperative that you release a few prototype ads in the market, track their responses and compare them to see which one your target audience liked best.

Then, you have to combine all your inferences and use them in your ad to make it appeal to your prospects. This involves some patience, but the end result is worth it.

Another important point to keep in mind is that while some ads click based on some particular aspects, others might not if they aren’t similar to it in content.

So, carry out ad tracking for ads of similar type, but don’t combine them with ads that are completely different. All in all, ad tracking will help you understand your prospects better and produce ads related to their taste.

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Samuel Ng asked:




You must track the results of your marketing campaigns, especially when it comes to Google AdWords. In this way, you can cut down your spending on the losing keywords & scale up on the winning keywords. Here is a quick checklist on how you can track your pay per click results.

Leads Or Sales

First, define clearly the purpose of your pay per click campaign. Are you going to generate leads so that you can follow up with them on the phone or do you want to generate sales right away. Maybe you want to generate leads then follow up with them automatically with your email marketing system?

Conversion Tracking Code

Inside Google AdWords & other pay per click search engines, you as an advertiser can simply use the tracking code which is already provided for you. Just add that small piece of code on your thank you page & you are done.

The only limitation is, you can only track leads or sales & not both at once. If you do need to track both leads & sales, on top of the default conversion tracking code, you can use other tracking software such as Prosper202 which is free & AdTrackz which is inexpensive.

Google Analytics

Within your analytics you can look at the average time your visitor stays on your landing page. If it is too short, it only means that the first impression of your landing page simply turns people off.

You can look at your bounce rate, just to make sure that most people are not clicking away from your landing page before they even read anything. Put these 2 things together & you can see how well your landing pages appeal to your visitors.

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Matt Bacak asked:




Never underestimate the power of testing and tracking your website. This is something that should never be overlooked. It is such an important part of your business because it allows you to see what’s working and what’s not. This will in fact allow you to better see if where you’ve invested your money is worth it. If your testing and tracking results show poor results in a certain area, you know that you need to make some changes. Those simple changes can return thousands more dollars. That is why testing and tracking is so important.

So, what software do I recommend you use to test your web pages?

Well, an inexpensive program that is very powerful is OneShoppingCart. You can purchase a monthly subscription at OneShoppingCart.com. It allows you to have autoresponders for your opt-in pages, as well as shopping cart capabilities. But it also provides you with testing software called “Ad Tracker” within their software. Ad Tracker is great for A/B split testing. If you’re not familiar with A/B split testing, let me explain exactly what it is…

A good explanation of A/B Split Testing on Wikipedia defines it as “A/B testing, split testing, or bucket testing is a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates.”

A/B split testing can be used in email tests as well. You can test open rates as well as clickthrough rates since OneShoppingCart has this built-in feature. But although the software can test both, I’ll explain where you should focus your testing. Don’t focus on open rates as that means nothing. Your focus should be on your clicks. Use Ad Tracker within OneShoppingCart to access these results.

Of course, there’s going to be certain emails that get higher open rates. For those emails giving poorer results, you’ll then just have to work on those emails. You could look at that from that perspective. But from my personal experience, I really just care what the clicks are. Maybe I’m kind of off, but looking at what generated the most clicks seems to have the most importance in my opinion. Focusing on this has allowed me to make changes that produced very positive results in the end.

However, the best and only way to test your emails is to send an HTML version of your email in order to find out what’s working and what isn’t. The reason why I said you have to use an HTML email for testing is because you can’t use text email to test and gain the results. It won’t work. It has to be through an HTML email. If you’re using an ad tracker in your links when you’re sending out your emails, you are going to be able to find out the clickthrough rates, but you’re not going to know your open rates. So, HTML is the only way you’re going to be able to do access those results inside your shopping cart or inside your autoresponder program that you’re using.

But remember, your software must have this capability as it’s crucial to test and track to ensure you’re not throwing your dollars out the window.

In part 2 of this article series I’d like to address exactly how to do your testing if you’re testing multiple aspects of your website.

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