No matter where you are in your business, just started up or a seasoned marketer, you need to have an internet presence to maximize your revenue. And you need to take help of all kinds of internet advertising tools to announce your presence in the WWW world. As in the real world, so with the virtual world; the ad campaigns will spread good words about your product among the prospective customers. But draining out resources on senseless advertisements leads to nothing. The advertisements have to be successful to the point of boosting up the sales of your product. In real world, various tools are employed to find out whether a certain set of advertising are effective. In the advertising terminology they are known as ad tracking research. In case of internet marketing, you need to stage these kinds of tracking researches to know which advertisements are working to your profit and which are not. The process that helps you to evaluate the worth of different ads in the cyber space is known as ad tracking.

Every Online marketer will tell you that it is a must to monitor you traffic to maximize your revenue. There are several sources from which visitors are sent to your website and you have to know which of the sources is most traffic generating. The art of advertising is founded on the behavioral tenets of human beings that are unpredictable and ever changing. So you can not predict flawlessly, which advertisement will work and which won't. So constant testing and modification is important and the system of ad tracking helps you to monitor the result of various advertisements, so that you get the clue, where to make improvements or changes.

It is a simple program that basically records when your website URL has been clicked. It helps you to find the referring URL, where your visitor came from. You will also get to know about the browser and operating system and the exact time of the visit. Through an ad tracker, it is also possible to learn about total hits and unique hits. These records are stored in your machine and will help you to analyze the trends of responses over a specified time period. When you are online, it is possible to learn about the click made just a second ago.

You can find mainly two types of ad tracking program: Tracking Software and Tracking Service. The operation of two types of programs is more or less same. But they have certain distinctive features.

So far as the tracking software is concerned, it involves one time cost and installation. In this case your tracking URL carries your own domain name.

In the case of tracking services, the program is run by the provider's site. You have to pay a rental on monthly or annual basis for running the program. In this case your tracking URLs carry the supplier domain name.

You have to consider certain points to select between software and service. They are: types of visitors, campaign features, the way you want the report to be presented, your budget and technical efficiency and your membership to any affiliate program.