Why do you need advertising tracking software?
Brands that leverage advertising tracking analytics tools are better positioned to optimize and enhance their advertisements in real-time or after the campaign is over for future marketing campaigns. In addition to running A/B tests prior to launching an advertising campaign, advertisers need to understand the actual performance of that content once it goes live to ensure the ad is evoking the response intended from the campaign.
Without advertising tracking software, brands won’t be able to easily capture things like conversion tracking (who saw your ad and made a purchase of your product/service), affiliate marketing performance (how much traffic influencer or affiliate posts drove for your brand/product), or the return on ad spend (how much value your advertisement produced for the cost it took to run).
While there are many reasons why brands should be using advertising tracking software, below are three main reasons to consider:
- Convert customers
The core goal of any advertising effort should be to convert consumers into buyers/users of your brand. Of course, the initial goals of advertising campaigns might be to garner interest and awareness of your brand, but the hope is that those aware will eventually buy into your brand, or be a referral to others in their network.
In leveraging advertising tracking software, you are better informed about ad performance and whether or not your conversion rates are meeting expectations. If not, it’s a signal to your team to go back to the strategizing phase rather than continue to burn your ad spend on an advertisement that doesn’t deliver new customers.
- Improve campaign efficiency
By tracking your advertisements across channels, you can see where consumers are most engaged with your content (i.e. social media such as Facebook ads, website landing pages, Google ads, or televised ads). Knowing engagement metrics means future campaigns can run much more efficiently - no longer wasting budget or effort promoting your content on channels where traffic distribution is low.
- Improve audience understanding
Most brands have a good idea of who their target audience is in terms of demographics and maybe even purchasing behavior, but deeply understanding your audience through the means of advertising tracking takes the relationship a step further. Knowing how your audience reacts to your advertisements informs you if your target audience is generally serious, light-hearted, humorous, etc. - all elements that you can build into your future advertising materials.
How to choose the best advertising tracking software?
When searching for an advertising tracking software, keep the following elements in mind to ensure you’re getting the most out of your tool:
- Real-time data:
When you launch an advertisement, you don’t want to be waiting weeks to know if the ad campaign is performing well or not. You want an advertising tracking solution that allows you to monitor ad performance in real-time, so you can either make adjustments within the existing campaign time frame or pull the campaign and save your ad spend for a revised version down the line (if the ad is underperforming).
Without access to real-time data, you could be wasting valuable budget on ads that aren’t gaining any viewership or traction.
- Custom dashboards:
No two advertisements are built the same, and your dashboard should be able to reflect the uniqueness of each ad spot. Look for an advertising tracking solution that offers customizable dashboard options so you can personalize your ad metric reporting with brand colors, images, logos, videos, and a variety of chart options - ideally built with automation.
- Consumer preference tracking:
Look for an advertising tracking solution that can measure a number of consumer preferences - not just basic engagement. The best advertising tracking solutions offer advanced methodologies (such as A/B tests - also known as split testing) that can measure consumer preferences about specific elements of your ad - such as music choice, color scheme, logo placement, etc. as well as overall preference for each iteration of your tested ad.
- AI capabilities:
Look for solutions that offer AI features and tools to speed up your ad-tracking process. These types of features will allow you to spend more of your time strategizing and acting on your insights rather than on the tedious manual setup and analysis processes.
