An Ad Tracker is a computer program or script that resides on your website and allows you to tag each of your traffic sources. It then counts how many people come from those traffic sources. It can also keep track of how many of those people buy a product from you or perform some action, such as subscribing to your list or filling out a form.
It accomplishes this by acting as an intermediary between your visitors and your website. All visitors that come from your desired traffic sources must go through the Ad Tracking Software by clicking on one of the tracking links you have pre-designated.
A great Ad Tracking Script is Ad Trackz Gold. You can view a fully-featured live demo ad http://www.adtrackzgold.com
When setting up a tracking link, Ad Trackz Gold records two important pieces of information from you; first, the name of the label you would like for your desired traffic source, typically called a campaign name. Second, the destination URL for this traffic source, that is, the final place that the visitor will go to when clicking the tracking link.
So for example, if you are getting traffic from pay per click engines and ezine ads, you might create 2 labels, one called PPC, and another one called EZINEADS.
Of course you can get more detailed than that, you might want to have a different label for each keyword, and a different label for each ezine ad that you actually run. I’ll show you how to do this in chapter three.
Once you have given Ad Trackz Gold the name for the label and the destination URL, then it gives you a tracking link that looks like this:
http://yourwebsite.com/adtrackzgold/go.php?c=campaign
So when a visitor clicks on this link, he or she is accessing a script called go.php on your server.
The question mark acts as a separator between file name and variables. Everything after the question mark is called the “query string”.
This is true for all scripts. I’m sure you’ve seen links that look like this:
http://somewebsite.com/ascript.php?variable1=something&variable2=somethingelse
The script is called ascript.php. And you can see the variables, variable1 equals something and variable2 equals something else.
In the case of Ad Trackz Gold, c is equal to the label you’ve already pre-defined for your traffic source.
Here’s what go.php does when someone clicks on it:
-gets the value of c from the query string, which is the label for the traffic source
-looks up that label in the database to find the destination URL
-adds 1 to the total visitor count for that traffic source
-tags the visitor by setting a cookie, so that Ad Trackz Gold knows that this person has already clicked on this campaign
-sends the visitor to the final destination URL you specified
The most important part of all this is setting the cookie that tags the visitor. Without this essential step, Ad Trackz Gold would not be able to track which traffic source your sales come from, nor would it be able to distinguish how many unique people came from that source.
A cookie is just a text file that websites can write to your hard drive. There are a lot of security functions built into cookies so it’s actually pretty safe, contrary to what the media would have you believe.
In this case, all Ad Trackz Gold does is record the campaigns that visitors have visited on your website onto their computer so that the next time they visit, Ad Trackz Gold will know that they have previously visited that campaign.
And, when one of your visitors performs a conversion (a sale or subscription), Ad Trackz Gold looks up the cookie files to see which campaign was responsible for that conversion.
For example, when a sale is made, Ad Trackz Gold looks up the last campaign that was clicked (that has sales tracking turned on) and records the sale under that campaign. If an action is performed, it looks up the last campaign with action tracking turned on.
After a sale a visitor is typically sent to a thank you page. If Ad Trackz Gold was custom written for one particular person, then it would be easy to write a custom thank you page. But that’s not viable if you’re trying to offer a solution for many different website configurations and payment processors.
So someone came up with the idea of having a script display a 1×1 invisible pixel images. It’s actually quite ingenious.
When you display an image, normally, on an html page, you assign the location of the image in the code and the browser displays the image. Except in this case, instead of assigning the location of the file, we assign to it th location of a script that performs some action, and THEN displays the image. To the browser, it just looks like an image is displayed, but in actuality, a script was executed and some actions are performed behind the scenes.
For Ad Trackz Gold, what happens is that the script looks up the visitor’s cookie and determines the last campaign that was clicked (that has sales tracking turned on) and records the sale under that campaign. Then it displays the image.
So now you know, roughly how scripts works, how an ad tracker works with cookies to do all the things it can do and now do not hesitate to check out the Ad Trackz Gold Demo at http://www.adtrackzgold.com/demo
