A random effort is excellent when creating free content, but paid ads require a solid tracking strategy and ad tracker application. If you don’t have these, you’ll just be burning a huge hole right through your pockets.
The number one reason most marketers or affiliates don’t make a six-figure income online is the lack of systematic tracking for ads. So how do you track your ads properly?
Systematic Ad Tracking
The first thing you should do is establish a naming system or convention that makes sense to you. Identify the different traffic sources or ad platforms you’re currently receiving traffic from. Try to find a logical way of naming individual ads. For example:
- One ad platform (AdWords, for example) may divide a campaign into ad groups or sub-campaigns, followed by the actual ads themselves.
- Other platforms may not have ad groups, so there’s only a single tier of organization for all ads. Read more about this in our PPC tracking guide.
- Some referral traffic sources (Gmail for example) may not pass referral data, resulting in the mysterious “Direct Traffic” label you’ll likely see in your Google Analytics account.
- Bought banner ads across multiple blogs or forums? You need to keep track of banner sizes, banner locations and banner variations as well.
Think about how you can create a standardized naming convention for every ad, referral and organic traffic. Next, create a master spreadsheet and assign a name to each ad campaign.
For example, a Google AdWords ad that is targeting only the content network may be named KDL-ADWC. It doesn’t make sense to you, but to me, it means an ad to my website from Google AdWords Content (C) network.
Create an Ad Tracking Link
Once you have a naming system, create a Campaign in LinkTrackr to start tracking ads. In your Campaign, you can specify up to 5 parameters, similar to how the Google Analytics ad tracking URL builder works.
Enter your campaign names and ad names in here as per your naming system, and get your “campaign ad tracking link”. (If you did not create a naming system, then you’ll end up making random campaign names that will not match up in your reports, and will not give you a clear idea of your campaign activity.)
Our ad tracking features allow you to track your conversions as well as affiliate commissions with pixel tracking. So make sure you also create a Goal for conversion tracking and put it into the correct pages before your campaigns are live.
With our intuitive and useful ad tracking reports, you can instantly see changes in traffic and performance. You can easily view the individual stats for each ad tracking link as well. And most importantly, you will be able to see the sales and leads generated from your ad campaigns, the profit or loss, and ROI.
Track Your Ads with LinkTrackr
Online marketing is a numbers game, and we help you win it. LinkTrackr is 100% hosted ad tracking solution, so there is nothing to install, nothing to configure and nothing to worry about.
- Discover which traffic sources work for you, and get more of it.
- Use it as a classifieds ad tracker or Craigslist ad tracker.
- See changes in traffic, conversions and profitability instantly.
- Simple ad tracking interface that anyone can understand and use.
- It works perfectly out of the box, packed with features.
So go ahead and create your LinkTrackr account right now to start using our ad tracking tools.
