What is Ad Tracking?

Ad tracking tracks the impact of advertising channels. Ad tracking can be used to track the return of investment for advertising spending. Ad tracking can also be used to track how effective your ads campaigns are, and how much you spend on advertising to increase sales.

With your digital advertising data and customer data you can easily extract granular information that allows you to track how ads impact sales.

Digital advertisers are able to access almost as much data as traditional advertisers. It is essential that they spend a lot of time analyzing the data and identifying trends. Advertisers can use ad tracking to improve their ability to measure the effectiveness of their ads, test new campaigns quickly, and revise ads faster based on the data they collect from their tracking tools.

Digital advertising is an important part of growing your brand awareness. You as a business owner should ensure that every ad purchased offers a reasonable return on investment. Site owners should encourage their digital advertising team to monitor their ads and find out how they are being used. If you are working with top-quality digital marketing agencies in new york, follow the same procedure. Your words of encouragement can make your ads more trackable, and therefore data-proof.

Ad tracking can be more complicated than it seems at first. With the right strategies and tips, you can make ad tracking a valuable and viable part of your Las Vegas digital marketing agency campaigns.

The Benefits of Ad Tracking

These are the proven benefits of including ad tracking in your digital marketing strategy.

Get valuable insights into your target audience

Let’s face facts: understanding your audience is the most powerful tool you have to better serve them. Ad tracking is a great way to gain an advantage over your competition. You can gain deeper insight into your audience’s needs and behavior through ad tracking. This includes which ads are most popular and their buying habits. This information can be used to tailor-make your experience.

Ad campaigns can be more effective.

Your campaigns will not generate the desired results if they aren’t tailored to your audience. It is easy to create ads that your audience will like. Ad tracking allows you to track every detail about your audience’s motivations and interests and what drives them to engage with a brand. You can monitor important advertising metrics like cost-per-click and conversion rates with a lot more ad trackers. These metrics directly affect your ad spend. Failure to track your ads could result in your business continuing to pay for low-value clicks, and incurring higher CPC.

Increase your ROI

Digital marketing is not for the faint of heart. Each business owner wants solid returns on ad spend. How can you guarantee a positive ROI if you don’t know the right ads to create? Ad tracking makes it possible to create personalized ads that your audience will love. The conversion rates automatically increase, which means the return on investment is significantly higher.

Combine marketing efforts across channels and platforms

A business can’t just focus on one platform. Multi-platform advertising is essential to stand out from the crowd and gain an edge over your competitors. It can be difficult to coordinate multi-platform strategies. Ad tracing eliminates this concern as you can monitor and advertise to the exact same audience across all channels. Facebook Pixel allows you to create audiences for Facebook ads based on traffic to your site. Ad tracking is a great way to boost your marketing efforts.

What can you track with Ad Tracking?

Modern digital marketing relies on data gathering. This is an extremely sophisticated technology. Marketing and SEO teams can track click-through rates, the rate at which users click on ads or ads embedded in emails, and a variety of other metrics such as page views, social media impressions, and return on investment for paid-per-click ads.

Ad tracking allows you to better understand your audience’s interests and their behaviors. Ad tracking is not a one-size fits all solution. Every business has its own priorities, and each ad campaign has its own goals. Business leaders who create new advertising campaigns need to identify the most important metrics and then develop their own ad tracking systems.

How to Start Ad Tracking

Your first step to creating your own ad tracking platform is to identify your problems. Look back at past campaigns that failed to perform and determine the reasons. You can use past data to determine why your digital advertising efforts did not meet your expectations. Then, adjust your future campaigns accordingly. If you spend a lot of money on Facebook ads, but your ad tracking software reports that Facebook generates little traffic to your site, you can see that your future spending on Facebook marketing is not necessary.

Your pain points will help you define your goals more clearly. Before you can start tracking ads, you need to identify what you want to track. Do you want to keep visitors on your site longer? Or do you want to increase traffic via paid ads on Google. Are you looking to increase the clickthrough rate of your marketing emails? You should set clear goals for your next campaign. Then, create a tracking system to track your progress towards achieving those goals.

5 Types Of Ad Tracking Methods

There are many options for ad tracking. You decide which method is best for you. 

1. Monitoring pixels

A tracking pixel can be described as a 1×1-pixel image space that fits in the body of an email. The tracking pixel transmits data to you when the recipient opens an email to view it. The tracking pixel can help you gain valuable insight into your customers’ buying habits and relationships with your brand. You must be careful with them and only collect data that is relevant to your customer relationship. The best way to optimize the buyer’s journey of your average customer is to track pixels.

2. Cookies

Nearly all internet users are familiar with cookies in some way. Nearly every major website asks users to consent to the use of cookies when they visit these pages for their first time. Cookies are temporary internet files that allow advertising teams to gain valuable insights into user behaviors. Sites must consent to the use of cookies. This is why cookie requests are present on almost every major website today, when they load their landing pages.

3. DoubleClick Ad Tracking

Google bought the DoubleClick advertising platform in 2008. It now effectively runs ad campaigns across multiple channels for advertisers. DoubleClick ad tracker is likely to have caused you to see ads for a product you viewed on an online retailer site. Google has rebranded DoubleClick as Google Marketing, Google Ads and Google Ad Manager. However, the core functions remain the same. To analyze user behavior and determine the best way to use advertising space on a site, the system uses both first- and third-party cookies.

4. Facebook Ad Tracking

Facebook advertising remains the most popular social media channel and is still the top choice for many businesses. The Facebook ad tracking plugin can be used to create targeted audiences and gain insight into how users interact with your Facebook page. This will allow you to determine purchase intent and influence visits to your website.

5. URL tracking

URL tracking is probably the most basic form of ad tracker. URL tracking is the simplest form of ad tracking. When a user clicks on a link that is associated with an ad campaign that spans multiple channels, you get a report about which channel created the link. This report is incredibly useful in tracking the success of multiple advertising channels that are used in the same campaign.

These are just some examples of effective ad trackers you can use right away. The type of marketing you use to market your products or services will determine the best type of tracking. Tracking pixels are useful if you rely on email marketing to collect data about click-through and open rates.

To advertise on multiple websites using Google Ads, it is important to understand the basics of cookies, how they work and what you can do to analyze them. To ensure that you get a satisfactory return on your investment, Facebook advertising should be a major part of your Los angeles digital marketing agency budgets.

Is Ad Tracking Illegal?

Ad tracking is often criticized for invading privacy. We need to look at the legality and ethics of ad-tracking.

The legality of ad tracking is still a gray area. Although there have been no regulations regarding ad tracking for some time, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation provides some protection. Websites must get consent from users before collecting any personal data. This includes information about your economic, social or cultural identity. Websites that offer ads must explicitly ask visitors to consent to third-party cookies. This is part of GDPR compliance. The vast majority of users don’t read the terms and conditions and opt in anyway. Regulators find it extremely difficult to determine if the tracking was done in compliance with legal requirements due to the large amount of data that is processed by ad tracking software.

The California Consumer Privacy Act, which is based in the US, gives users the right to request the deletion of their personal data that has been collected through ad tracking software. Companies are also required to inform consumers about possible data breaches. Ad tracking tools do not have to get consent from users, unlike GDPR. Ad tracking tools are able to track and collect data automatically, even if the user does not opt out.

Why is ad tracking a great business move?

It’s simple to see: why spend a lot of money on advertising if it doesn’t work for you?

All ads are created to target user behavior. Ad tracking gives you a real-time tool to determine your ROI and see if the ads are generating the leads that you want.

Let’s take, for example, the advertising of nutritional supplements promising better hair, nail, and skin health. Ad tracking can help you find which ads resonate with your target audience the most. This data is very useful because it gives you insight into the interests of your target audience. This will allow you to not only provide them with a better experience on your website, or through your social media channels, but also enable you to retarget them. You already know they’ve interacted with ads for skin products so there is no need to guess how to lure them into buying the products. Directly nudge them in that direction.

Ad tracking will allow you to spend more wisely and increase your business’s growth. You could be spending money on unsuccessful advertising strategies that won’t bring you any leads.

It is also easy to find out what resonates with your audience and then target them with ads that encourage them to convert. You will see a greater volume of sales, higher quality leads and more conversions. This will increase your business’ profitability. Higher conversions can also be achieved by tracking conversions. Smart bidding strategies can be used to optimize your ads campaigns according to your business goals. Optimized ads are a great way to convert more people.

Common Ad Tracking Mistakes You Might Make

Despite all the benefits that ad tracking provides, marketers can easily make these mistakes and not get the most out of it. These are the top ten things to be aware of:

Your internal sessions are also included: Double-check that your IP address does not appear in the data you want to track. You will be able to see an exaggerated number of visitors, but it will only your visits that are being recorded.

Not tracking conversions: Ad tracking’s ultimate purpose is to assess key metrics that give you insight into your audience’s behavior and how they interact to your ads. The failure to track conversions can render the whole exercise useless and impact your future campaigns.

Don’t let your ad tracking efforts go stale. Consistent analysis of the results is essential if you want to see consistent results. To make adjustments to your ad tracker methods, look at the key metrics. Ad tracking data is valuable. It is not a one-and done exercise.

Ghost spam is not being blocked. Using unfiltered analytics data to identify fake visits can have serious consequences for your advertising campaigns. These fake visitors do not interact with your site but they give you the impression you are getting traffic. These fake visitors are often viewed as genuine interest by marketers and they continue to be served with ads. To ensure you only get the truthful data, it is important to set up filters.

Missing annotations: Annotations are custom text you can enter for specific dates. Annotations make it easier to discover what happened on a specific date. You will need to guess what happened that day if you notice an increase in traffic. If you don’t add annotation, you may have to do it again. This information is especially helpful when you compare ads from different times periods.

9 The Essential 9 Tools for Marketers 

Ad tracking is not something you can do by yourself. If you don’t use the best tools on the market, your results might not be sufficient to make sustainable changes in your Miami digital marketing efforts or to understand the effectiveness of your ad campaigns. These must-have tools will help you make the most of your tracking.

1. Everflow

Everflow is a popular choice for marketers because it has a lot of features and a great UI. You can easily set up an Everflow account to start tracking. Everflow is a cost-effective tool that provides automation and actionable insights. You can narrow down the targeting options to only examine traffic that is compatible with your products. Everflow offers additional functionalities, such as the ability to block traffic from duplicate clicks and proxy servers.

2. Link Tracker

Linktrackr, an ad tracker software, can help you track sales and conversions from your ads. All data is saved to the cloud, so you can always access it. This tool can also be used to generate graphical reports. It doesn’t allow for ad tracking scheduling.

3. Ad Trackz Gold

Ad Trackz Gold is a paid tool. However, it stands out as an outstanding tool because of the functionality it provides for tracking clicks, actions, sales, and links. Although you cannot schedule tracking activities, you can customize, shorten, and split-test links. You can also launch campaigns during your trial.

4. Voluum

Voluum, a marketing platform, can monitor all of your advertising campaigns and provide actionable insights that will help you optimize them. Monitoring takes place in real time and lets you see approximately 30 metrics for every click and conversion. It is easy to find the most engaging ads that resonate with your audience. Volumm allows you to manage all traffic sources and your affiliate marketing campaigns from one platform.

5. AdEspresso

This tool is used by most marketers to work with Facebook, and to track and create ad campaigns on other social networks. This app allows you to track the conversions and evaluate the performance of your ads. It is possible to link ads to external URLs. This makes it easy for you to track every step of the conversion funnel, even if you have multiple campaigns.

6. Bitly

Bitly is a great option if you don’t have the budget for a full-featured ad tracking software. Bitly is most commonly used to shorten URLs. It can track clicks and links. To understand the performance of your ad campaigns, however, you’ll need to analyze the data. Bitly’s inability to do split testing is another major problem.

7. AdMinder

This paid ad tracking software can do many actions such as tracking clicks, sales, downloads and subscribers. It can also provide regular reports on CPC, ROI. Although it does not support split testing or scheduling, the tool is worth a try, even if the trial version is free.

8. Pretty Link Pro

This is a paid-only tool for ad tracking. Pretty Link Pro is the right tool for you if you are looking for click and conversion reports. It works through a WordPress plugin and can perform basic split testing, campaign setup, and link shortening.

9. Tapfiliate

It is a cloud-based, comprehensive affiliate tracking software that marketers can use to crate and analyze their affiliate programs. There are more than 30 integrations available, including Shopify and WooCommerce as well as Stripe. It allows you to personalize your affiliate pages, referral link, emails, and launch a global campaign.

Get the most out of your next marketing campaign

No matter how many marketing channels you use, ad tracking can offer numerous benefits to your next campaign. Ad tracking can help you better understand your audience, serve their needs and interests accurately and maximize your marketing dollars.

Modern digital Marketing in Phoenix requires constant effort. It is impossible to expect strategies that worked two years ago or last year to work the same next year. You need an ad tracking tool to track your progress, react to market changes and customer habits and provide higher-quality interactions for your audience.