Advertisement Tracking or Ad Tracking is the process that helps with keeping track of an advertising channel’s impact. Advertisement tracking is used to help track your return on investment made towards an ad. It also helps you to track exactly how effective your ad campaigns are and how much your ad spend translates to increased sales.

With the help of advertisement tracking, you can acquire a lot of granular data points from your digital advertising and customer data. This makes it easy to calculate the impact of ad campaigns on sales in real time. Prior to the advent of the internet, it was extremely difficult for advertisers to acquire data in support of their ad campaign. Modern digital advertisers have no such issues. In fact, they might actually have “too much” data. Having that much data also means that a lot of time must be devoted to extracting valuable insights and trends from the data heap. Advertisement tracking makes it incredibly easier to measure the effectiveness of an ad. It also helps advertisers test out new campaigns with low investment and modify their ads at a much faster rate in response to the data gathered with the help of tracking tools.

In today’s world, digital marketing plays a massive role in increasing your brand awareness. Whenever you purchase an ad, you should ensure that you get a good return on investment with all ads you purchase. A website’s digital advertising team is supposed to track ads, find out the engagement details and come up with new and improved ways of leveraging ads. Though advertisement tracking might appear simple at first, it does have some nuances and minor complications. Don’t worry though, once you are done reading this post, you will have a much better grasp on advertisement tracking. Let’s get started:

Advertisement Tracking: Important Aspects to Understand

What All Can You Track With Advertisement Tracking?

Data gathering is incredibly sophisticated and now forms a cornerstone of modern digital marketing. Advertisement 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 to social media post impressions and return on investment for pay-per-click ad campaigns.

Advertisement tracking helps determine your audience’s behavior 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.

Advertisement Tracking: Getting Started

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. Before you can start advertisement tracking, you need to decide what you want to track. 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.

Advertisement Tracking: Different Methods

While there are a few different methods for ad tracking, what serves you best, has to be your choice completely. Take a look at some of the options below and choose the one (or ones) that best serve your needs. Here they are:

URL tracking

One of the simplest methods of advertisement tracking is URL tracking. When a user clicks a link associated with your ad campaign spanning multiple channels, you receive a report about  which channel generated the link. You can use it to track the performance of multiple ad channels which form the part of an ad campaign. 

Cookies

If you have literally visited any site, ever, you must be familiar with the term “cookies”. Almost every website makes you agree to their cookie policy before you can browse through it for the first time these days. Cookies are temporary internet files that help advertising teams gain useful insights on user behaviours on their websites. However, sites must gain explicit consent to use cookies, hence the reason why cookie requests exist on virtually every major site today upon loading their landing pages. Cookies are also the reason you see “boxing gloves” ads on your Facebook page right after you visited a boxing website.

Tracking pixels

A tracking pixel is a 1×1 pixel image space that fits into the body of an email message. When a recipient opens the email to view the message, the tracking pixel transmits this data back to you to notify you the email was opened. Tracking pixels can potentially help you gain valuable insights about your customers’ buying journeys and overall relationships with your brand. However, you must use them conservatively and only track data that is relevant to your relationship with a customer and aimed at providing the customer with superior experiences with your brand. Tracking pixels go a long way when it comes to optimizing the average customer’s journey with your company.

DoubleClick ad tracking

Google acquired the DoubleClick ad platform in 2008 and now uses it to effectively run ad campaigns for advertisers across multiple channels. If you recently viewed a product listed for sale on an online retail site and then noticed ads for that item seemingly following you around the internet afterwards, this likely occurred due to DoubleClick ad tracking. Google rebranded the DoubleClick platform as Google Marketing, Google Ads, and Google Ad Manager, but the nuts and bolts remain the same. The system uses first and third-party cookies to analyze user behaviour and determine the best use of advertising space on a given site.

Facebook ad tracking

Facebook is still the leading social media platform and Facebook advertising is now a major digital marketing channel for countless businesses. You can use the Facebook ad tracking pixel to create custom ad targeting audiences, gain insights as to how user interaction with your Facebook page influences visits to your website and determine purchase intent.

These are just a few examples of effective advertisement tracking methods you can start using right now. The best type of tracking for your business of course depends on how you market your products and services. If you rely heavily on email marketing, tracking pixels help you collect data about open and click-through rates. In case you use the Google Ads platform to advertise on multiple websites, you’re going to need to understand how cookies work, how to collect them, and the types of cookies available for analysis. If Facebook advertising is a large part of your digital marketing expenditure, you should take full advantage of the tracking capabilities Facebook offers to ensure you are getting a good return on your investment.

How can advertisement tracking help your marketing campaign?

Advertisement tracking can provide several fantastic benefits for your next marketing campaign, no matter how many channels you intend to implement. Tracking your advertisements will help you understand your audience better. It will also help you serve your needs and interests in a more specific manner. You will be able to get a much higher return on every single dollar that you invest towards advertising. However, don’t forget that modern digital marketing is continuous work. The effort has to be continuous and advertisers need to re-invent themselves continuously. Advertisement strategies that worked a year ago, might be utter failures today. An advertisement tracking system will help you track your progress over time and is a must have for every advertiser. Advertisement tracking also helps advertisers respond more efficiently and effectively to shifts in the market and consumer habits. Aside from doing all of that, advertisement tracking will also enhance the quality of interaction that your customer has with your brand.