It is essential to track online advertising to ensure that your advertising and marketing are effective and help you stay ahead in today's world of severe competition.
There are four possible mechanisms to track your advertising:
- Using your website logs
- Using special URLs
- Installing your own tracking software
- Using remotely hosted tracking software
Using your website logs
A regular check of your website logs can tell you roughly how many times a particular page has been viewed over a certain period. Hence if you run a campaign pointing people at a specific page, you might get a rough idea of how successful your campaign has been.
However, your website logs are not an ideal ad tracking tool since you would not get an exact picture, especially when you are running a number of campaigns simultaneously.
Using special URLs
This is a modified way of the website log approach. You can generate special URLs for each campaign you are running by adding "?" followed by a code to the end of your website addresses. Your website log would register them as separate web addresses. You can analyse your logs to find out which page registered maximum hits.
This again is not the best way to track online ads as normally you do not analyse your website logs that frequently.
Using tracking software
Tracking software uses the same principle mentioned under Using special URLs.
When a visitor comes to your site, instead of going directly to the page their browser shortly visits a program on your web server. This visit is registered by the program which then directs the browser to the page.
You can then check the tracking software using your browser any time you want, and it will give you full statistics instantly on that particular campaign.
You can set up as many trackers as you want.
There are different tracking systems available and the scripts and software you have to install varies from system to system.
Using remotely hosted tracking software
If you do not want to be bothered by scripts and software installation, your best option is using remotely hosted tracking system.
At Neo Digital, we have our own third party tracking software known as Brand Central. Brand Central is the most powerful enterprise-class advertising management and serving solutions that manages online media campaigns from A to Z in the Middle East.
It's a one stop-shop platform for marketing managers and clients, advertising agencies and creative directors, media planners and media buying agencies, and media portals and publishers.
To know more about Brand Central, visit the dedicated section that tells you all you need to know about it.
