What is Ad Tracking And Why is it Important?

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A Beginner’s Guide to Ad Tracking

Ad tracking is tracking the performance of digital marketing campaigns over a period. This means observing consumers’ interactions with ads, their impressions, clicks, conversions or any other type of engagement. The objectives of ad tracking are to determine how well the targeted audience is being reached through the ad and the extent to which the conversions such as sales or leads are likely to be accomplished.

Ad tracking commonly involves the utilization of tracking pixels, cookies, and URLs to capture more details about consumer activities, such as following impressions or clicking on an advert. It offers direction to marketers by pinpointing what is effective for campaigns, enhancing strategies, and redirecting budgets to ensure the best ROI. Sophisticated tracking also encompasses data unique to other channels including social media, search engines and display networks. However, ad tracking is a broad term. 

Tracking Marketing Channels – All you need to Know

Marketing channels are the platforms brands use to promote their products or services and connect with their target audience. Here are a few marketing channels- Organic Search, Paid Search (PPC), Paid Social, and Email marketing are important marketing channels. These channels help drive traffic, engagement, and conversions. This means tracking a number of touch points, including organic search, paid ads, e-mail marketing, social media platforms, and direct traffic.

Information on user activities and channel performance can always be tracked using tools such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Hotjar, HubSpot and other marketing automation tools. 

Why It Matters:

Checking channels enables brands to distribute their budgets better, improve their approach, and target audiences that bring better ROAS. It also has a view of customer contacts and the buying processes of the customers, which can be used to enhance opportunities with the highest probability of conversion.

Key Metrics to Monitor when Tracking Ads :

Monitoring key metrics is essential for understanding the performance and effectiveness of Ad campaigns. Here are some main pointers:

1. Traffic Volume: It refers to individuals visiting your website through various sources like organic marketing, Social Media, PPC and Direct Traffic. It helps in recognizing the channels that are generating the highest number of visitors and identifying trends.

2. Conversion Rate: This measure indicates the proportion of website visitors who finish a specific action (such as buying a product or subscribing to a newsletter). It is essential to assess how well each channel converts visitors into leads or customers.

3. Cost per Acquisition (CPA): Indicates the expense linked to gaining a new customer via a specific channel. The calculation involves dividing the total channel spend by the amount of conversions it produces. A decreased CPA signifies a more effective channel.

4. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): This is the metric that calculates the income produced per dollar invested in marketing. Increased return on ad spend indicates improved efficiency in marketing expenses. The calculation is determined by dividing Revenue from Ads by Cost of Ads.

If you incorporate these metrics in your regular marketing analytics, you will be able to make proper decisions on improving your marketing.

Additional reading: What Are Tracking Pixels and How Do They Work?

Benefits of Using Ad Tracking

Here are some time-tested benefits of incorporating ad tracking as part of your digital marketing strategy: Before you go to the best ad tracking tools in town to request their ad tracking services, the following points should be taken into consideration.

1. It brings you important and relevant information about your target market

As every performance marketer will agree, finding out what your audience desires is perhaps the most valuable asset you can ever have towards meeting their needs. That is why ad tracking can be valuable and help you get ahead of your competitors. Ad tracking can tell you even more about your audience including what they want and how they behave, especially about the ads that capture their interest and provide insights about their spending capabilities. This information can be capitalized to give them the much-needed unique experience.

2. Ad campaigns provide extensive learning opportunities with continuous potential for improvement

The only way that your campaigns will work the way you want is for you to apply the right touches that your audience needs. It leaves you crafting advertisements that you suppose will align or click with your audiences. But with this ad tracking, you get every single detail that you would have wanted to know about your audience and what makes them or will make them respond to a particular brand. It makes it even easier to keep tabs on key ad cost factors like the cost-per-click, conversion rates and click-through rates the more ad tracking you employ.

3. Your ROI shoots up

All brands expect a firm foundation in return for ad expenditure. But unless you know what kind of ads to make, how do you ensure positive ROI?  Since ad tracking allows you to create customized ads for your audience that you know they will love, the returns are considerably higher because the conversions tend to increase.

Additional reading: How to Use Marketing Attribution and Optimize Your ROI

What Decision Can You Make With Ad Tracking?

The collection of ad data is very advanced and currently, it is a part of the basic tools of modern digital marketing. Ad tracking assists in establishing the behaviours of your audience and thus assists in clarifying their interests. So there are no general rules as to what ad tracking is appropriate ad tracking. It means that every brand is different and every ad campaign has individual objectives consisting of one or multiple goals. Most marketers that are in charge of creating new ad campaigns should set which parameters are critical for brand success and develop their ad tracking methods.

How to Get Started With Ad Tracking

To begin with ad tracking, one of the most important steps is to choose the marketing technology stack that most effectively aligns with your brand targets. Your marketing technology stack consists of various tools and platforms that assist you in gathering, analyzing, and utilizing data from your advertising activities, enabling you to monitor performance across multiple campaigns and channels. Here are your key steps to building your tech stack:

1. Define Your Objectives: Before you can choose the right tools, you need to understand your goals. Are you focused on increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or driving conversions? Align your tech stack with these goals to ensure you’re using the right data sources and platforms​

2. Gather Relevant Data: Collect data from various sources such as social media platforms, websites, and CRM systems. This helps in understanding where your audience is coming from and how they interact with your campaigns​

3. Choose Tools for Data Collection and Analysis: Depending on your needs, you might use CRMs to track customer data, web analytics platforms like Google Analytics to monitor website traffic and Marketing attribution tools to understand the full customer journey​.

4. Integrate Your Tech Stack: Ensure that your tools can communicate with each other. Seamless integration between ad servers, analytics, and other platforms allows for better data sharing, reducing manual efforts and streamlining workflows​

5. Monitor, Test, and Adjust: Once the system is in place, continuously monitor your campaigns. Test different strategies and adjust based on real-time insights to maximize ROI​

By following these steps, you can monitor the success of your campaigns and make informed choices about which channels and advertisements are providing the best outcomes. This method guarantees that your advertising budget is utilized efficiently, and your marketing initiatives are in harmony with your brand objectives.

What Decision Can You Make With Ad Tracking?

Ad tracking is the fundamental foundation of the measurability of marketing in the data-driven context, to help brands make better decisions that increase ROI. Here are key decisions you can make with effective ad tracking:

• Budget Allocation: Remarketing increases the possibility of remarketing ads getting clicked and lends an understanding of which ad channels or campaigns are generating the highest Return on Investment so ad budgets can be directed to those outstanding ads.
• Audience Targeting: If you have performance data, you are also able to optimize audience segments in order to target the right people with your ads at the correct time.
• Content Optimization: CTRs help decide what content is working with your audience, and what is just not. Adjustments can then be made to push them towards what the audience likes.
• Attribution Insights: Advanced ad tracking systems give you a far better picture of attribution, thus improving how you optimise your customer journey.
• Performance Benchmarking: Benchmark your campaign results with industry standards so that you can adapt your strategies to stay competitive.
• ROAS Calculation: Follow and determine the ROAS properly to understand whether our campaigns generate profits and can be continued.

Ad tracking eliminates guesswork and turns marketing into decision-making for brand growth hence improved precision.

5 Types of Ad Tracking Methods

Several methods exist for ad tracking. It is ultimately up to you to decide which methods are most appropriate for your goals:

1. Tracking pixels

Tracking pixels are tiny images embedded in emails, ads, or websites to collect data on user behavior. When someone interacts with content containing a pixel, it records valuable actions such as clicks, page visits, or conversions. This data helps marketers understand audience engagement, track ad performance, and refine targeting for future campaigns.

However, you need to apply them prudently and only measure data that is relevant to your relationship with a customer and designed to deliver superior experiences with your brand to the customer. The application of tracking pixels can be a success when it comes to fine-tuning the average customer’s journey in the buyer funnel with your brand.

2. Cookies

In one way or another, almost everyone using the internet today has come across cookies. Currently, when becoming a visitor of these source’s pages for the first time, every large website prompts users to state their cookie preferences. Cookies are small temporary files that assist the marketing teams in understanding certain behaviours on their websites by internet users. For example, a user has a QR code of the Brand logo to increase brand recall and ends up on the company website.

Cookies enable the site to follow the user’s activity; therefore, being able to understand the user and promoting more contextual ads on ad platforms. The use of cookies needs to be opted in thus explaining why almost every major site has cookie consent requests the moment you open their landing page.

4. Facebook ad tracking

Facebook remains the most used social network and Facebook advertising has become one of the most popular social media marketing methods for millions of brands. A Statista study revealed that Facebook earned around $113.6 billion in advertising revenue in 2022, highlighting its significance in digital marketing approaches. All these can be done through the Facebook ad tracking pixel to create a custom ad targeting audience, to see precisely how a user interacts with your ads and how that affects visits to your site and to figure out purchase intent.

5. URL tracking

Maybe the easiest thing to do for ad tracking is URL tracking. If a user clicks a link connected to the multi-channel ad campaign, you get a post-click report which informs you which channel is linked to the clicked link. This is a perfect way of measuring the success of different advertisement channels that may be employed within a given advertisement campaign.

That is it on the types of ad tracking techniques that you can implement in your brand as you embark on normal brand operations. That being the case, the best type of tracking for your brands depends on the method you use to advertise your products and services. If you largely use email marketing, pixels are useful in receiving data concerning the open and click-through metrics.

Why is ad tracking a good business proposition?

Let’s think about it this way: why would you bother investing a fortune in ads when you are not confident that those ads are in some way effective for your brands?

Remember all ads are created with respect to the user implication. Ad tracking gives you the real tool to validate your ROI, especially if the specific ad that you are publishing is effective in delivering the leads you need. Select the appropriate technique out of pixels, to server-to-server tracking to get the maximum return on investment for your marketing.

Additional reading: Server-Side vs Client-Side: A Marketer’s Overview

For example, when you go through ad tracking, you realize that the type of ads that your audience is responsive to are skin supplement ads. This information is probably one of the most important pieces of information that is all-encompassing in telling exactly what your target audience cares to know about. Not only can you give them a better experience should they visit your site or interact with your social media profiles, but you can effectively retarget them as well. Since you already understand that they have engaged with ads for skin supplements, there is no guesswork on how to get them to buy the supplements. And the best part is, you can guide them right, by pointing them towards the correct path.

The time saves resources in the right proportion and thus the higher growth of your brand is made possible through ad tracking. Without tracking you might end up funneling your advertising dollars to strategies that are not going to generate any leads for your brand.

In Conclusion

Ad tracking is a crucial instrument for gaining insights into your audience’s online activities and tastes, providing important information on their interactions with your brand.  It enables companies to make decisions based on data by tracking essential metrics like traffic levels, conversion rates, cost per acquisition (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS). Utilizing sophisticated tools such as tracking pixels, cookies, and attribution models, marketers can assess the performance of different channels, manage their budgets more effectively, and ultimately enhance their ROI.

EasyInsights provides strong advertising tracking features, enabling brands to monitor and examine data across various marketing platforms. By utilizing custom attribution modelling, EasyInsights enables marketers to grasp the impact of different touchpoints along the customer journey. This enables brands to enhance their campaigns, manage budgets efficiently, and reach the appropriate audience at the right moment. 

Want to see EasyInsights in action? Book a Demo with us, today!