Digital advertising is about growing online presence, brand awareness, and constantly improving ways to reach potential customers. Ad tracking tools help businesses gain useful insight, optimize campaigns, and achieve higher ROI.
What are Ad Tracking Tools?
Ad Tracking tools offer an all-in-one platform to gain insight into demographics and impressions and help boost sales of a business. These tools provide valuable insights to identify new marketing opportunities, build targeted marketing campaigns, manage customer relationships and win over leads. Following are a few benefits of Ad tracking tools:
It helps in improving content and campaigns.It enables you to learn and understand more about your customers.It allows businesses to convert and increase advertising revenue.
Types of Ad Tracking
Ad tracking is a very broad term, and various tools and platforms help businesses track them. The following are different types of Ad tracking: Link Tracking It is the most simple yet most useful for tracking. It helps businesses to track who clicked or shared your links and gain useful information. Affiliate Link Tracking This form is used for affiliate programs, providing a tracking source of shared links and rewards affiliate networks. Pixel Tracking A tracking pixel provides information about customer behavior, the number of people viewing your ads, the duration of time they viewed it, and the number of clicks. Facebook Ad Tracking Facebook pixel helps offer valuable insights into Facebook ads and helps to create more targeted and relevant ads. It boosts Facebook advertising ROI. Cookies Cookies collect user activity or behavior on the website and help create retargeted ads.
How to do Ad Tracking on a social media platform?
To advertise on different social media platforms, one needs to be clear on what goals one wants to achieve. Remember various factors before choosing an advertising platform and getting the most out of your budget.
Facebook is the best and most preferred advertising platform. It helps to reach the maximum number of targetted audiences and impact them through Facebook Ads. When considering Facebook Ads as an advertising platform, feel its unique targeting feature, like a lookalike audience. The platform allows users to choose who can see your ads based on their country, language, age, city, postcode, and many more.
Like Facebook (its parent company), Instagram offers various segmenting options. But due to its comparatively small users, the segmented audience becomes smaller. If you want to target internet users aged between 18-49 years old through creative photos and videos, then this is an ideal platform for you.
LinkedIn is mostly preferred as a B2B advertising platform as the platform is all about professional networking. LinkedIn is an ideal advertising platform for targeting a specific professional audience like HR Managers in New York. Their Sponsored InMail is one of the most attractive advertising formats.
Mistakes to Avoid in Ad Tracking
Identifying and avoiding common mistakes is the key to creating an effective and successful ad campaign. Find below some of the mistakes to avoid in tracking ads:
Not Defining Your Target Audience: If you want to reach your target audience and increase ROI, defining the correct target audience is a must. It will help you choose who will see your ad based on demographics, location, and interests.Wrong Conversion Tracking: Keep each campaign separate and use the right tool to manage and provide accurate data.Using wrong keyword and match types: Defining keywords and match types helps to show your ads to those searching for the related keywords.Not defining negative keywords: As important as defining keywords, it is equally important to determine which keywords your ads should avoid.
Top Ad Tracking Tools
Following are some of the most popular and effective Ad tracking tools:
Voluum
Voluum allows tracking all digital campaigns from one software. This software helps you track what is working and which campaign is performing the best. Key Features:
It allows 40+ software integration with other platformsIt helps to identify suspicious clicks and visits in reportsVoluum has intuitive UX and contemporary designThe traffic Distributed AI feature of Voluum analyses data daily and sent traffic to campaigns, offers, landing pages, etc., that are performing the best.
The software tracks link performance and are an excellent tool for managing your affiliate programs.
Cometly
Cometly is an Ad tracking software to track, analyze, optimize, and scale ad Campaigns. It helps businesses with better ad attribution, analytics, and decision-making insights. Key Features:
It accurately tracks every sale to the correct ad and uses data to improve ad performance.It offers integration with ClickBank, Instagram, Facebook, and Shopify.The platform provides training videos to help users get started with the platform.Other key features of Cometly are Attribution modeling, Multi-touch attribution, ROI tracking, Conversion tracking, and Cross channel attribution.
Cometly offers seamless integration with the largest ad and sales platforms with one click.
BeMob
BeMob is a real-time data reporting and ad tracking software for media buyers and affiliate marketers. Key Features:
The platform is the one-stop solution for tracking, managing, optimizing, and analyzing Ad traffic.It helps to analyze campaigns and boost ROI.It has a safe tracking feature to keep data securely in a cloud without needing a different server or software.It has introduced weekly improvements to optimize work and increase productivity.It provides notifications through email to help users be aware of all the ad campaign changes, thus preventing potential loss.BeMob offers affiliate marketing features such as Real-time click tracking, Campaign management, Smart links, Multi-device support, and Performance Analytics (Affiliate)
The platform offers a dashboard in multiple languages like English, Chinese, Spanish, and Russian.
Plat
Plat offers performance-driven ad tracking solutions to businesses and media buyers. Key Features:
Plat offers 24/7 performance alerts to keep updated all the time.It offers real-time data tracking and helps to download detailed data from organic traffic logs and ad impressions.The platform offers detailed performance reports to optimize campaigns and update rulesets.It allows custom conversion tracking, optimizing campaigns manually, traffic distribution, and easy integration with other platforms to monitor and manage all campaigns.
Plat has an intuitive interface and comprehensive customization feature to offer end-to-end performance marketing.
Madgicx
Madgicx is a cloud-based marketing platform offering various features for every business need. Key Features:
The platform offers flexible spend-based pricing, meaning businesses have to pay for the tools or features they want to use.It has a one-click Ad Launcher feature that helps to create ads using performance visualization, existing ads, and Facebook or Instagram posts.It helps launch tailored ads to target specific audiences.Other key features of Madgicx are content management, conversion tracking, social media monitoring, and campaign management.
AdsBridge
AdsBridge is an Ad tracking solution for various types of businesses that helps them to increase profit from marketing campaigns. Key Features:
The platform allows multi-user access and shows logs to keep a check on changes.It helps distribute traffic and routes it to the most performing campaigns.It offers stats with real-time data and issues.AdsBridge offers a quality check on incoming traffic to avoid ad fraud as much as possible.
The platform provides excellent customer support through its support center, helpdesk, and support team.
Meta Pixel
Meta Pixel, formally known as Facebook Pixel, is a Javascript code that allows tracking visitor activity when added to a website. This analytics tool helps to get great insights and improve advertising campaign conversions. Key Features:
Meta Pixel offers one of the most powerful targeting capabilities and builds custom audiences.It helps build a lookalike audience to reach a more relevant and tailored audience.It can track key performance metrics to keep checking Facebook Ads performance.It allows optimizing conversions based on your business needs, whether sign-ups or purchases.
Businesses should install Meta Pixel on their website even if they are not running Facebook Ads, as it will start collecting website visitors’ data which will help launch Facebook Ads later.
Bitly
Bitly is popularly used for shortening URLs. Businesses or marketing individuals with comparatively low budgets can track links and clicks using the platform. Key Features:
It offers the best features for link shortening and customization.The platform allows creating multiple short links at a time.Bitly provides one of the best link-tracking features to small businesses.A data dashboard lets users gain insights on click rate, link history, app installation, campaign performance, etc.
Bitly supports third-party platforms like SMS communication, Salesforce, Twilio, and Adobe.
Conclusion
An effective ad management tool is a necessity for businesses to make media buying activity run smoother for longer. Do your research and find the right one to meet your business needs and goals. You can build, optimize, and report on campaigns in real-time using the ad tracking tools mentioned in the post. You may also explore some Google Analytics alternatives to measure your website analytics and performance.
