Ad Tracking Software

If you are into Internet marketing and putting ads out there, unless you are keeping track of where your traffic is coming from and which ads are working and which ones aren't, you are literally advertising in the dark. There are many pieces of software out there that will do an adequate job of tracking your ads. This article is going to briefly review some of these.

Probably one of the oldest ad tracking services on the net is Adminder which is a very reliable tool. It will track when someone clicks on one of your ads, tells you the time, the IP address of the person, and other assorted pieces of information. Adminder is relatively cheap at 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 increasing spam problems, Adminder was the victim of multiple spam complaints several years ago due to a mass campaign against them. As a result, they had to include in their terms that no Adminder tracking links could be used in email advertisements. If you wanted to use Adminder links to track email promotions, you had to place these links into another URL, like a TinyURL. It's an extra step and a bit of a pain, but if you do a lot of email marketing, it is a necessity.

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

However, Adminder is not the only game in town. There is another excellent ad tracking tool called Dyna Tracker which is a PHP script that runs on your server. So, if you want to use this, you need 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 many ways as you can customize it to your needs and it will track sales of your own products as well as affiliate products.

Another popular software is Campaign Analyzer, by Eastwright Corporation. This software is also very powerful and similar to Dyna Tracker. The truth is, most of the upper end software trackers are similar, which is why another option is simply to create your own script if you are at all proficient with PHP and MySQL. PHP has 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 choose, 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 an invitation to failure.

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