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 ad tracking mechanism work? To track performances of all your advertisements, you have to simply place the 'tracking' URL provided by the ad tracking 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 auto responders, exit pop-ups, article, affiliate, ebook and reciprocal links, and newsletter, banner and off-line ads.

Using software means one time investment. You have to install it once and it goes on rendering you services for years. You need to have some minimum technical knowledge to deal with its installation procedures. If you are not confident of installing it yourself, the software company can also install it in your website for a nominal fee. The tracking URLs carry your own domain name in case you are using an ad tracking software.

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 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.