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 ClickEx.net, 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. ClickEx.net), 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.