You don’t play the lottery with the intention of missing out on the results, do you? The same way you don’t run online advertising campaigns without tracking their efficiency… Wait a minute, you do, do you? Okay, it’s not the end of the world, but getting yourself an ad campaign tracking tool has just become your number one priority. Here’s why.

Who Needs An Affiliate Ad Tracker?

The simple answer to the question above is; everyone who is running performance marketing campaigns. Typical users of campaign trackers are media buyers, affiliate marketers and advertising agencies. But the truth is – if you are doing any online marketing – tracking the results is a necessity.

What Does Ad Tracking Software Do?

An affiliate ad tracker is a software designed to help you navigate through all your campaign results in one place and optimize them. In other words, ad campaign trackers gather data from all your campaigns and present their efficiency in one interface, so it’s easy for you to see what’s working and what’s not.

The data presented by a tracker is supposed to provide you with enough insights to optimize your campaigns, and in result, increase their efficiency.

Trackers monitor lots of data points. Starting from visits and clicks, through costs and profits, to conversion rates, CPA, ROI, and a whole lot of other measures.

Campaign trackers let you sort this data, and get in-depth insights, like the best converting traffic sources on a specific device, using a particular carrier in a given country.

Insights like these help you make the right decisions in the process of optimizing your campaigns. Hell, if it weren’t for the insights, optimizing wouldn’t even be possible, apart from merely guessing what will work.

Optimizing is the key to success and you will never outdo your competitors without constantly improving your campaigns. This can include even simple improvements such as adding the use of electronic signatures for signing contracts to speed up the process.

Finally, tracking your campaigns makes you eligible to make the most out of our platform as well. For example, Zeropark’s Rule-Based Optimization (RBO) can only work if you pass on your conversion data; hence it’s only available to users who track their ads.

RBO automates the optimization of your campaigns with the set of if/then rules that you define. For instance, you can choose to automatically pause traffic sources that don’t bring a specified number of conversions despite a given spend. 

Why Google Analytics Is Not Right For Affiliate Tracking?

Even though you can use a bucket to drink water from it, it doesn’t mean that you should do that. Buckets weren’t designed for this – as opposed to glasses. The same goes for Google Analytics and performance marketing campaign trackers.

The Google solution is great for measuring traffic, its sources and users’ behavior on your website. However, it allows you to analyze only the data of your own website, which is pretty much useless in affiliate marketing that is based on promoting products and services via external channels.

Obviously, you could just track the efficiency of your campaigns by checking only the data incoming from the connected traffic sources, but this would only measure what happens on your side, and wouldn’t tell you if your landing pages actually led to a conversion.

We’d advise you to avoid Google Analytics as your primary measurement tool for performance marketing, as the discrepancies in results can be quite significant. These discrepancies can result from database mismatches, tag firing and various javascript errors. Affiliate landing pages can sometimes take a few seconds to load, which can prevent Analytics from triggering, and hence, recording a visit that did occur.

Aside from that, some campaign trackers are equipped with optimization calculators, actually giving you a tool for increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns on the spot. Additionally, select trackers allow A/B testing, so you can try out different landers for a campaign and proceed with the more effective ones. Trackers like Voluum can even optimize your campaigns for you thanks to their AI algorithms.

Learn How to Integrate Your Zeropark Account with Voluum and Benefit From All The Killer Features That Come With It! 

Campaign trackers also deliver much more extensive reports, adjusted to the needs of affiliate marketers.

Finally, campaign trackers let you retarget users with another offer, based on the information gathered about the user while they load a page. This opens up another world of opportunities that only campaign trackers can get you to.

How Do I Choose a Campaign Tracker – Google Analytics Alternatives

When choosing a campaign tracker, there are some things you may want to look out for. First of all, the already mentioned features, which give you an advantage over the marketers who still use the more traditional ways of tracking, such as Google Analytics.

So look for the ability to A/B test your campaigns, retarget your users, and other features that help optimize your actions, like automatically pause and resume segments of traffic or notify you the second the performance of your ad campaign changes thanks to advanced AI-powered solutions.  

Bot Traffic Filtering

Another feature worth a mention is fraudulent traffic filtering, which some of the best campaign trackers on the market have. It also increases the efficiency of your advertising campaigns, by eliminating fraudulent traffic, which wouldn’t bring any lifetime value anyway.

Campaign Optimization Simplicity

Additionally, it’s important to have a tracker that is intuitive and simple to use, so you don’t get confused setting up your campaigns. One that lets you, for example, swap the offer a lander is redirecting to, without the need to edit the whole lander.

Affiliate Tracking Speed

Also, keep in mind that you need a fast campaign tracker. This is important because you don’t want the tracker to slow down the process of loading pages, and thus, worsening the user experience, while revealing the fact that the user is being tracked. Fast also means high responsiveness and real-time data at your disposal.

You should also care about reliability, so look for a tracker that has never had any serious downtimes.

Finally, don’t forget to think forward and get yourself a versatile campaign tracker. A versatile campaign tracker follows all the data that you need to track, and all the data that you may need in the future.

Summarizing, if you’re a performance marketer, you just can’t get away with not using a campaign tracker. It is a basic tool for knowing what’s going on with your campaigns, what is bringing you conversions, and what is a waste of money. Based on insights brought to you by a campaign tracker, you can take steps to optimize your campaigns and thus become more efficient and successful as a marketer.

Get yourself an ad tracker now!