Ad Tracking Software

If you are into Internet marketing and putting ads out there, unless you are tracking where your traffic is coming from and which ads are pulling and which ones aren't, you are literally advertising in the dark. There are many pieces of software out in the world that will do an adequate job of tracking your ads. This article is going to briefly review some of these. While some are better than others, it is important to get something.

Probably one of the oldest ad tracking services on the Internet is Adminder. They've been around long before even I hit the scene. Adminder is a very reliable tool. It will track when somebody clicks on one of your ads, tell you the time, the IP address of the person and other assorted pieces of information. Adminder is a relatively cheap service for about $17.95 a month. There are some drawbacks to using Adminder if you are going to use their tracking links for email ads.

Because of the increasing spam problems, Adminder was the victim of a mass of spam complaints several years ago due to a mass campaign against them. As a result, they had to include in their terms of service that no Adminder tracking links could be used in email ads. If you wanted to use Adminder links to track email promotions, you had to place these links into another URL, like a Tiny URL. It's an extra step and a bit of a pain in the backside, but if you do a lot of email marketing, it's a necessity.

Another drawback of Adminder is that it will only track conversions if the product you are promoting is your own. In other words, if you are promoting affiliate products, it will only track ads that are clicked on but will not track where the actual sales are coming from.

However, Adminder isn't the only game in town. There is another excellent ad tracking tool by the name of Dyna Tracker which is a PHP script that runs on your own server. So yes, if you want to use this, you do have to have your own hosting. With Adminder, you do not. That is one of the advantages of Adminder. However, Dyna Tracker is much more powerful than Adminder in so many ways as you can totally customize it to your needs and it will track your own sales of your own products as well as affiliate products. This script is highly recommended for tracking sales through Google Adwords campaigns.

Another very popular software is Campaign Analyzer, which is manufactured by Eastwright Corporation. The software is also very powerful and quite similar to Dyna Tracker. The truth is, most of the upper end software trackers are very similar in operation and function, which is why another option is simply to design your own if you are at all proficient at PHP and MySQL. PHP has all the capability to track IP addresses as well as an assortment of variables. A good PHP manual will have all the session variables available to you.

Whatever solution you decide on, whether it be an online service like Adminder or a software like Dyna Tracker or creating your own script, do something. Advertising without knowing where your traffic is coming from is a ticket and invitation to failure.

To YOUR Success