A Complete Guide To How Ad Tracking Works
Hello, fellow humanoids. It’s me, Alex Becker, CEO of Hyros. In a typical post, we’d discuss all the nitty-gritty, granular details of advanced ad scaling and ad tracking, but today, we’re going to go broader and almost go back to the beginning.
In this guide, we’ll talk about all the things that are important with ad tracking, how it works, and why you need to do a better job of your tracking.
If you’re looking for ways to increase your ad spend ROI or optimize your Facebook campaigns to make a lot more, then this guide isn’t for you. Well, maybe it is. It depends on how much you understand the basics.
Learning the fundamentals is always a great strategy. For example, when Michael Jordan was in high school, he was cut from his High School basketball team.
He didn’t make the varsity team. Imagine having the guts to tell Michael Jordan he wasn’t good enough, okay? But what did he do? Did he transfer schools or quit basketball?
Nope.
He went home and worked on his fundamentals. If it was good enough for Michael Jordan, arguably the best professional basketball player of all time, it’s probably good enough for you minions.
Okay, so we’re going to discuss what ad tracking is and why it is important.
You’re going to see that tracking your ads is important, but it can also be a ton of work. But don’t be scared that tracking your ads will require a lot of effort to do correctly; there are tools available like Hyros to help you.
What Is Ad Tracking?
We can’t talk about ad tracking, not because it’s some secret thing like “fight club,” don’t talk about fight club; we can’t talk about ad tracking without knowing what it is first.
Ad tracking is collecting data and insights about the performance of your online ads.
Put another way, ad tracking will show you the ads that are performing and those that aren’t.
That said, you could use a platform like Facebook, utilize their ad tracking, and still need to have all the correct information. That’s because Facebook will stop tracking one step away from Facebook.
So if you’re running multiple ads that all head toward Facebook, the Facebook report will only show customers that came from immediately outside of Facebook’s platform. It won’t do a deep dive into where your customers came from, especially if you’ve been nurturing them for a long period of time and on multiple platforms.
Instead, you need to be able to track all your sources, all your ads, and all your campaigns so that you can increase your ad buy on those ads generating sales for you and stop those that don’t.
Why Is Ad Tracking Important?
If you’re doing any type of marketing, from selling kayaks out of your house to selling high-ticket products online, you need to track your ad data to see if you’re doing anything right and what you can do to improve your ads.
If you’re running a single ad for widgets and you sell one widget, then your ad tracking is pretty simple.
Ad runs=sale. No ad running, possibly no sale.
Now, if you want to improve the ROI–return on investment for newbies–you’d need to look a little harder at some of the data and consider an A/B test on your ad.
For those of you who have been hiding in a well for the past decade or more, an A/B test is a method of ad tracking that compares two similar ads.
Differences in the ad could be the color or design of the ad, the copy included, or who the ad was targeting. With an A/B test, you run a couple of ads and find what performs better, and you keep optimizing and running these tests until you get the perfect ad.
This won’t happen, but if you shoot for perfection, you could just get to excellence though.
Ok, so if you’re running multiple A/B tests and multiple ads on different platforms, deciding which ads are performing and which aren’t can be challenging.
It’s also important. If you don’t track your ads, you spend money, throwing it away. This might be why you might have been living in a well if you didn’t know about A/B testing.
So don’t be like that guy. Instead, be sure to track your ads.
Another reason tracking your ads is important is that it lets you see which ads to scale and improve your ROI.
Facebook likes to pat itself on the back, so if you’re running an ad that goes to Facebook and someone opts in, Facebook will take the credit. So you may increase your ad spend on the ad directly, leading to Facebook as a result. This is a dumb way to go about your ad spending.
Look, you’re running multiple ads, and any one of these, or all of them, may have been what helped a person decide to click on your Facebook link and click in opt-in.
But Facebook wants to look good, so they’ll take the credit. And you’ll increase your ad spend based on that tracking result when really it’s been a whole bunch of your ads and channels that get the customer there.
So tracking your ads, but doing it effectively, by that I mean seeing all the data going back to the very beginning of when a person clicked your first ad, helps you analyze what is working best for you so that you can scale those ads to increase your ROI.
There are a few technical tools that you can use to track your ads, but those are probably best left to the professionals.
These tools and options include placing a bunch of code onto your website or landing page and tracking from there.
Tracking URLs, pixels, and cookies are the tools and code you could use, and I’ll briefly go over each right now. Also, we’ll discuss social media marketing tools like Google Ads and Facebook Pixels.
Tracking URLs: You could track URLs from your website, which could be used for emails and sidebar displays.
Tracking URLs is one way to get the insights you need, especially for PPC campaigns, email campaigns, or ads on another site. For example, they can help determine how many visitors are coming from those ads to your landing page, the leads you get, and the related conversions.
Pixels: Tracking pixels is a small image that is often impossible to see, that when people open your email, check out your webpage, or more, it collects data from that user and sends it back to you.
Ideally, pixels will help you track a user through the entire process of your campaigns and funnels so that you can gain insight into how your ads are working throughout.
Cookies: No, I’m not telling you to sit down with a bunch of chocolate chip cookies and wait for people to click your ad. Cookies are ways to gain insight into users’ behaviors and need to have explicit use to be used.
Cookies work best to align your ads with browser tendencies, so if a person is looking at shoes, for example, if you’re running an ad for fitness products, your ads would show up once they browse for workout shoes or running shoes, or tips on working out.
Google Ads: If you’ve ever looked at a product or read an article on a blog and then seen those products and services follow you around everywhere you go on the internet, that’s a byproduct of Google Ads, formerly known as DoubleClick, cookies. These cookies are in the form of first-party and third-party.
Really quick, first-party cookies are those that collect info from you when a person visits your site or ad. Third-party cookies are when an advertiser places an advertisement on another site other than the publisher’s site.
Facebook Pixels: Basically, a Facebook pixel tracks similarly to online pixels mentioned before. The only difference is that Facebook collects the information and sends it back to your Facebook ad manager account so that you can better optimize your Facebook ads. So see, it’s all about Facebook, as I said.
As you can see, there’s a lot to track and a lot of work that you have to do, which is why we created Hyros, so that you can track all your ads and get the right data to increase your ROI. With Hyros, we guarantee you’ll increase your ROI by 20-30%, or you won’t pay anything.
So it’s worth it to give us a call.
Types Of Ad Metrics To Track
Ok, so you now understand the types of ad tracking options you have; you also need to get a better grasp on where to track from so that you can give better attribution to your ads.
Ad attribution is basically a way of giving credit to your ads that produce the desired results. It’s an old “atta-boy” to the ad.
There are five primary sources of ad data to track
Sources Of Ad Data Tracking
The primary sources of ad data you’re interested in could vary, but generally, it’s based on your running ads.
PPC: Pay-per-click ads tracking will look at all your paid ads, including search ads, Facebook, YouTube, Display ads, and Native ads. Since you pay for each click people make on these ads, it’s crucial to analyze each ad.
Search Ads
Search ads are ads that you pay for and are placed as a result of an online search. If you Google “ad tracking software,” the results that appear with the banner “sponsored” are those types of search ads.
Facebook, YouTube, and Social Media Ads
These types of ads are a type of marketing that places ads into social media channels like Facebook and Instagram and deliver them to your target audience.
Display Ads
Display ads are the types of ads that appear on a webpage or video that has a link to your website, opt-in, or landing page.
Native Ads
Native ads mimic the platform they are on; for example, a paid video ad on YouTube that mirrors the rest of the content a person is searching for.
As you can see, there are a lot of different ads and channels you need to track and various ways to track them.
There are so many different things to look at with ad tracking that you could spend a whole day looking just at the previous day’s ad results and have zero time left to optimize and increase your ad spend.
Types of Ad Tracking Metrics To Analyze
When you start tracking your ads, you need to know what it is you’re trying to track. You could be looking at any number of the following;
- Conversions
- Opt-Ins
- Return on ad spend
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Email Open Rates
If you’re selling high-ticket items, conversions may be the most critical metric for your tracking. Or if you’re in the info product is your sphere, then opt-ins may be your key metric.
Whatever your tracking point, focus on the end goal and work backward to determine the type of tracking you want to perform.
How To Track Ads Better
Ok, there are many ways to track your ads and things to analyze. And you only have so much time. So what do you do?
You need to find a more efficient way to track your ads. Simpler, easier, and more accurate.
Which is what Hyros provides for you. At Hyros, we make tracking easier for you. Focusing on print tracking and Ai learning, you’ll be able to attribute your ads and scale them quickly to increase your ROI by 20-30%.
Combining the two tracking tools, you’ll be able to track your ads and improve your ad accuracy, leading to better conversions.
Print Tracking: Print tracking provides up to 50% more ad attribution than if you were tracking from just the ad platform alone. This will give you great insights into what it is the customer is looking for, what motivated them, and how to improve those ads that are performing.
Ai Ad Learning: Feeding the data from print tracking lets you train your AI in platforms like Facebook and Google to increase your ad accuracy, further increasing your ability to scale your ads and increase your ROI.
As you can see, there are a ton of ways to track your ads, and the importance of getting the right type of data and getting good data lets you make better ad-buying decisions. But, on the other hand, bad data keeps you stuck in the weeds spinning your wheels.
You could try to track all your ads on your own, or you could get results without a ton of work.
Hyros makes ad tracking simple and can show you the best type of data to scale your ads and increase your ROI by 20-30%. It’s been proven time and time again. Just look at our other pages for proof.
Some big names on there have benefited from using Hyros, so let us help you as well. Book a call. And the best part is that you have 90-days to increase your ROI, or you pay nothing.
Also, if you’re interested in learning more advanced ad scale and tracking strategies, check out our YouTube channel and subscribe to get the best tips available.
Finally, check out our Facebook mastermind if you’re curious about online ads, Hyros, or whatever. It’s got over $50 million of ad spend experience right there, discussing everything that is working and what’s not right there for you.
Ok, that’s it for now. Ad tracking is crucial for your ad success and ad scale. This guide was prepared for you to understand the foundations and grow your business.
See you all soon. This is Alex Becker, CEO of Hyros, and if you want to learn more about ad tracking and how Hyros can help you, subscribe to our YouTube channel.
HYROS TRACKING
If you are interested in obtaining the same stats I showed in this video and even having us help you set this up, GO HERE to get more information on HYROS.
Ad Training and Tactics
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HYROS Facebook Group
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