Understanding the Importance of Ad Tracking for SMEs

If you’re spending any portion of your advertising budget on online advertising, then you should also be paying attention to ad tracking. If you’re not tracking your campaign then you will have no idea if it’s been successful, or which of your key terms are driving the most traffic: without this information, you are just blindly throwing money at a campaign.

Ad tracking via software such as Voluum will prevent you from wasting your time and money on wild guesses, instead of providing you with a wealth of information about your campaigns, so that once you have discovered the combination of ads that are working best for you, you can keep that magic formula going.

With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about the importance of ad tracking for SMEs, and how you can harness ad tracking and use it to its full potential:

Proper prior planning

If you haven’t already started your online advertising project then it’s important that you take the time to plan your project in advance: undertaking keyword research before you launch your campaign will enable you to better understand the keywords that will work well for your campaign objectives. It will also give you the opportunity to understand what those brand objectives are: are you hoping to drive more sales, increase brand awareness, or do you simply want more traffic to your website (and if so, why? What should those visitors be doing when you get them on your site?)

You may wish to consider running surveys amongst your email database, social media audience or existing customers to gain a solid appreciation of what those customers already think or know about your brand, and what they expect to see from you going forward.

Allow easy automation

The best ad trackers provide tools that enable easy automation, which will not only make running your ad campaigns easier, it will also make it almost fool-proof to achieve the results you’re hoping for. You can integrate all of your traffic driving campaigns within just one tool and then use this to set up the rules and tools that will work best for you, whilst also auto-optimising your campaign, harnessing the power of the tools expertise to fill in any gaps in your own knowledge.

This is also a great way to keep an eye on how much your online advertising campaigns are costing, and to control your expenditure, as the automation tool can stop and start your spending when it reaches certain limits, without the need to trigger these changes manually, which can be time consuming.

Accomplish your advertising goals

It’s important to remember that ad tracking can’t do everything: in order to accomplish advertising goals it’s essential to have high quality ads. More people are searching and buying online, via ads, than ever before: These ads should be memorable, significant, and spark a memory or an emotion in your potential customer base. You should change your ads regularly so that they don’t become stale, and stop attracting views and clicks. Ad trackers will help you to see when the interest in your ads begins to wane, so that you can change these in a timely fashion, and ensure that your ads continue to have maximum impact.