Ad Tracking is a vital means to ensuring that your advertising goals are being met. Many companies push their advertising out to sea with no knowledge of whether or not it achieved its desired goals.
Before the internet, it was difficult to tell whether or not your advertising was working. And if you were running multiple ads through a variety of mediums, as companies often do, it was even harder to tell which ones were working. Say Acme Widget Co is running a newspaper ad, a magazine ad and a television ad. They seem to be working as sales are up compared to the last quarter sales (which occurred under a different advertising campaign). But how can they tell if advertising is the reason why sales are up? And how can they tell which ads are working?
In traditional advertising, directives can be included to help track the performance of an ad. For instance, your print ad could list one phone number while your newspaper ad could list another. Whichever number was ringing the most would tell you where to put next months advertising dollars. You’ve all probably seen ads saying something like “mention this ad for a free desert”. For the cost of a desert, they learn that their ad is why you are there in their restaurant buying a full meal.
Ad Tracking on the internet is a lot easier and cheaper. Tools such as AdPlugg allow you to see exactly how many impressions and clicks an ad gets in real time. This would be like knowing that 1,000 people saw your ad in the newspaper today and that 200 of them then took the next step towards buying your product or service.
With AdPlugg you can view the ad tracking statistics of your ad through AdPlugg Analytics. AdPlugg Analytics shows your ad’s performance graphically so that you can see your clicks and impressions over time and see how they compare with your other ads. This is important not only for knowing whether the ad placement is working but also for knowing whether or not you should update the content or image for your ad.
At this point it should be obvious why ad tracking is so important to advertisers. But why do bloggers and other content providers care? Here’s why: if advertisers can’t tell that their ad with you is working, they are going to discontinue it or at the very least they will be reluctant to pay high rates for it. Consider the following infographic.
While high end sites such as YouTube and Facebook provide high end reporting and tracking for their advertisers, your blog doesn’t (at least not without AdPlugg or a similar tool). It won’t take long for the advertiser to give up on advertising with your blog if you can’t provide them with some form of Ad Tracking.
We want to hear what you think! Leave a comment or try AdPlugg today. You can be set up with AdPlugg ad tracking in seconds using our WordPress Ad Plugin or our ad snippet.