ONLINE ADVERTISING

What is Ad Tracking?

Ad tracking is a marketing term for the process of keeping track of how much of an impact an advertising channel has. Ad tracking can be used to track the return on investment for ad spending and helps the business to track exactly how effective your ad campaigns are and how much your ad spend translates to increased sales.

You can glean countless granular data points with your digital advertising and customer data, making it easy to see how ad campaigns impact sales in almost real-time.

While advertisers before the internet struggled with having almost no data to back up their new ad campaigns, modern digital advertisers have almost too much data. They must devote lots of time extracting the most valuable insights and trends from the plethora of data they gather. Ad tracking makes it easier for advertisers to measure their ads’ effectiveness, test new campaigns with minimal investment, and revise their ads more quickly in response to the data they gather from their tracking tools.

Digital advertising is a large part of how you grow your brand awareness. As a business owner, you should make sure every ad you purchase offers an acceptable return on the investment. Site owners must encourage their digital advertising teams to track their ads, find out who is engaging with them, and discover how to leverage ads more effectively.

Ad tracking is a more complex process than it may seem at first. However, with the right tips and strategies, you can make ad tracking a viable and valuable part of your digital marketing campaigns.

What Can You Track with Ad Tracking?

Data gathering is incredibly sophisticated and now forms a cornerstone of modern digital marketing. Ad tracking technology allows marketing teams to track click-through rates or the rates at which users click on paid ads and ads embedded in email messages, as well as a wide variety of other metrics, from page views and conversion tracking, to social media post impressions and return on investment for pay-per-click ad campaigns.

Ad tracking helps determine your audience’s behaviors and helps you better define their interests. However, there is no one-size-fits-all formula for appropriate ad tracking. Every business has different priorities and every ad campaign has unique goals. It’s essential for business leaders who develop new advertising campaigns to determine which metrics are most important and develop their own unique ad tracking systems.

How to Get Started with Ad Tracking?

The first step in developing your own ad tracking system is to identify your pain points. Think about past ad campaigns that have underperformed and try to determine what went wrong. If you have past data as a reference, you can determine how your past digital ad efforts failed to meet your expectations and adjust accordingly for the future. For example, if you seemed to spend an inordinate amount of your marketing budget on Facebook ads and your ad tracking system reports that Facebook generated minimal traffic to your website, then you know that you don’t need to spend as much on Facebook marketing in the future.

Identifying your pain points helps you more clearly define your goals. You need to know what you intend to track before you start ad tracking. Are you interested in keeping visitors to your website on your page longer, or are you trying to drive more traffic through your paid ads on Google? Do you want to improve the clickthrough rate for your marketing emails? Set clearly defined goals for your next ad campaign and develop a tracking system that helps you mark your progress toward reaching those goals.