If only digital advertising is as straightforward. In whatever strategy you implement, you need to know where your money is going. Ad tracking is one of those. This is where you collect data and insights about your campaign.
Track our ads online? Really?
This exercise is now more crucial than ever. If you cannot gauge the performance of your campaign, then you are just spending blindly regardless of how much you have in your budget. What really happens in ad tracking? Basically, you can track URLs, Pixels or cookies.
Ad Tracking boosts your KPI
It really depends where you are posting your ads that will determine where and how you can track them. If you are advertising mostly on websites, then you might want to consider tracking URLs. A tracking URL is like any other URL that you might come across. It has a tracking token behind the address.
Tracking URLs
For instance, a normal URL will look like this: http://www.rssst.com/your-landing-page. One with a tracking token will look something like this:http://www.rssst.com/your-landing-page/?utm_campaign=test-campaign&utm_source=emailThis will essentially send the action to the server when a user clicks on the URL. This basically records the clicks and where they are coming from and is very useful when you have the same ad on various sites. Now you know where your traffic is coming from.
Tracking Pixels
Tracking pixels are more popular among social media like Facebook. It is a small image that is placed either in a display ad or an email. A signal is sent to the tracking server once that particular page loads. In other words, if you place the tracking pixel in an email and the user opens it, you get a signal. You get to know how to target better when you track pixels. To some, this might be considered to be intrusive or even cheating.
Tracking Cookies
In ad tracking, cookies are perhaps the most popular and maybe least intrusive. They are also done with the consent of the user. Most websites will tell you that they use cookies and if they agree they can proceed. In fact, cookies give you a lot of insights into the behavior of the user. In fact, cookies are seen as the main engine behind targeting and retargeting exercises. If you want to align your ads with the web browsing activities of your user, cookies would be the best way to go.
