With the growth of e-commerce, online marketing has become an inescapable tool for the e-companies. If you want to reach out to greater number of customers, you have to employ several online advertising tricks. But how can you know which of the online advertisements do really work and which of them don't? The ad tracking program will help you to get familiar with the comparative worth of each online campaign. You can not do without this tracking mechanism, because you have to constantly experiment with the types and sources of advertisements to make them effective, that is drawing more and more traffic to your website, where customers can come to know about your product and also make some purchase.

How does the sales tracker mechanism work? To track performances of all your advertisements, you have to simply place the 'tracking' URL provided by the sales tracker program in your advertisement. When someone reads your ad on an ezine, say XYZ, and clicks on the tracking URL, which you have placed in this ezine, the visitor will be taken to your website and the ad tracking system will register that the click came from the XYZ ezine.

Now there are two types of ad trackers. The first is tracking software and the second is tracking service. The tracking software basically follows the mechanism described above. It helps you to generate specific web address for each campaign. In case you are using ad tracking software, the visitor can not directly go to your website. Instead their browser passes through a program installed in your web server, an additional counter is created for that address and then only the browser reaches your page.

The software will help you get all the stats via your browser any time with full details. With ad tracking software, it is possible to set up more than one tracker. Ad tracking software will help you to locate the ROI (return on investment) of your pay per click listings. It will also generate reports on the performances of the autoresponders, exit pop-ups, article, affiliate, ebook and reciprocal links, and newsletter, banner and off-line ads.

There are many different software's to choose from out there, some are free while others cost everything from a few dollars to a couple hundreds. If you don't know how to install and manage a script, then the best choice would be to spend a few dollars for an ad tracking software that includes installation and free support.

There are certain advantages of ad tracking software. If you are using software, you need not be dependent on another service provider company. Dependence on service provider may make you handicapped in certain events like when their site goes down or the company shuts off etc.
On the other hand, using a software requires your site to provide several system resources like disk space for program and tracking files and so on. Then in case of program up gradations, the software needs to be re-installed once again.

There are many reasons to choose ad tracking software instead of ad tracking service, but there are also reasons to go for a paid or free service. The same goes here; the paid services almost always provide more options and better support, but you can sertanly find good free ad tracking service out there.

It doesn't matter if you do pay per click ads, articles pop ups, e-books, email marketing, affiliates, newsletters, reciprocal links, site links, banner ads or surveys, always use an ad tracker.

TIP: Setup an ad tracking survey on your site, it will collect information on what your customers want you to offer them.