Several Ways of Online Ad Tracking
By: aempire | Posted: 23rd February 2008
Are you in any kind of web- business? Then you have to take
recourse of the online advertisements to expand your business.
And all online marketing efforts are incomplete without the use of
ad trackers. Ad trackers will let you know the size of the traffic a
particular campaign has been able to generate and also how many
clicks ultimately were converted into sales. You will find the most
important use of tracking in running and managing affiliate
programs. Tracking is being used by all kinds of e-business today.
No matter what kind of business you are running on web, you will
find a range of tracking methods suitable for your type of business.
Each method comes with its unique advantages and
disadvantages. Let's describe the basic features of some of the
most important tracking methods.
Hit Counters: It is the ideal method to be used by the webmasters
who just want the information as to how many times a particular
page has been visited. Placed at the bottom of the page, the hit
counter registers the 'hit' every time a visitor enters the page.
However, this method provides only limited information.
Direct URL Tracking: If you have a single-page sales site, you can
consider using this method to track sales on your website. This
tracking method is effective for tracking only the immediate sales.
It can not identify the visitors that visited the website through a
particular referral and came back later to make a purchase. In this
method, the affiliate ID in the URL is always visible, and it entails
the risk of link piracy.
Cookie Tracking: It is by far the most popular method of ad
tracking. Cookies are small text files that are written to a user's
browser whenever an affiliate's link is clicked. Thus the referral
gets stored in cookie and is recognized at the order page. And
affiliate is credited for the referred sales. Not only they are simple
to be read on any form, they are stored until commissions are
rewarded to the referring affiliate. This way, affiliates are rewarded
for the immediate purchase as well as the purchase made latter
but within a specified period.
CGI/URL Tracking: it is a Perl or JavaScript enabled method that
track the visitor right from the affiliate site to the merchant's site
until the visitor reaches the order page. In this page, the affiliate
ID is detected from the URL string. The Perl or JavaScript catches
the affiliate ID by reading the current URL, and passes it on to the
URL of the next page. It requires skilled design to maintain every
link within the merchant's site. If the script fails, the merchant's
site will also fail. This method helps in tracking the customers who
have disabled their cookies. So it used to be employed as a backup
to cookie tracking. But it is no longer effective to be used that way,
as the end users can easily remove the affiliate ID from the URL
and re-enter the site. In that case cookie tracking does not come
to any help.
Self Replicated Pages: In this method, affiliates create their web
pages on a template provided by the advertiser and these pages
can be found in the directories at the merchant's website. It has
been proved to be a reliable and effective method.
The motto of ad tracking in the end is not only counting on the hits,
but how many hits have actually transformed into sales leads.
Several ways of tracking help you to analyze the effectiveness of
different marketing approaches and which of them bring the most
profitable results for your company.
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Tags: traffic, web business, affiliate programs, business today, advertisements, marketing efforts, commissions, affiliate id, risk, recourse, immediate sales, referral, matter what kind, advantages and disadvantages, piracy