How to Choose an Ad Tracker and Why It's Essential for Successful Media Buying

JULY 17, 2023 AFFILIATE MARKETING EXPERT OPINION
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Internet marketing, and specifically media buying, is one of the most popular ways to earn money online today. Professionals use many tools to successfully launch advertising campaigns, including proxies, white page generators, virtual cards, multi-account browsers, trackers, and more.

Multi-account browsers allow for running advertising campaigns from hundreds of different profiles and evading blocks, while an ad tracker is an integral part of their monitoring, optimization, and scaling. Using a tracker offers the ability to set up traffic funnels, conduct A/B testing of landings and offers, protect against spy services, transfer postbacks and parameters between sources and affiliate networks, and many other functions. Without these, it can be genuinely challenging to achieve a high ROI.

Our partners from Keitaro Tracker have prepared a brief guide for you on choosing the right tracking software to maximize the profits from your advertising campaigns.
Postback is the transfer of information about an action from one platform to another: e.g., from an affiliate network to a tracker or an ad network.
Spy services are special online tools dedicated to giving their users information about their competitors, their promotion strategies, major performance indicators of their ad efficiency, etc.

Tracker Type: Cloud vs Self-Hosted

The first thing you need to decide is whether you're going for a cloud-based product or a self-hosted solution that you'll deploy on your server.

Cloud trackers require no installation. After logging onto the website, all its functionality will be at your fingertips.
Here are some advantages:
  • Quick Start: There's no need to install or configure a server; everything is ready for operation.
  • Scalability: Cloud trackers easily scale to your needs and do not require reinstallation on a new server in case of a significant increase in traffic volume.
  • Maintenance: Technical maintenance and updates are performed by the provider, taking this worry off your shoulders.
The drawbacks are:
  • Cost: Cloud trackers usually cost noticeably more than self-hosted solutions, which can be expensive, especially for beginners.
  • Data Confidentiality: All your data is processed by the service provider, which may raise concerns about security and privacy.
  • Limited Customization: Cloud tracking platforms generally don't provide you with the ability to embed custom scripts, filters, redirects, configure server operations, and so forth.
A tracking system like Keitaro, just like Octo Browser, is a self-hosted solution. It requires server installation, which slows the start a bit, but gives the user such undeniable advantages as:
  • Control and Confidentiality: You can fully control your data and customize the server to your needs.
  • Customization Flexibility: Working on a client-server allows you to load user filters, redirects, and scripts directly into the tracker and apply them immediately. In addition, you can connect any domains and configure their certificates or proxy.
Such complexities as installation can be delegated to support (Keitaro's support will help install the tracker for free). With a good server provider, the scalability issue can be solved by a simple hardware upgrade without stopping the traffic or migrating to a new server.

Basic Functionality for Traffic Setup

It is possible to outline a minimum necessary set of functionalities required to launch advertising campaigns, which almost everyone will need.
Keitaro Dashboard. 

Keitaro Dashboard.

These include:
  • free domain parking for campaigns;
  • the ability to transfer all click parameters from the source and subsequent filtering by them;
  • the ability to send postbacks from the landing page to the tracking platform and from the tracker to the advertising network (S2S);
  • availability of filters and flexible traffic funnel settings with blocking of bots and unwanted visits;
  • split testing of streams, connecting several landings and offers within one campaign/stream;
  • local landing pages for the possibility of working without redirecting.
It's crucial to ensure that all these features are included in the tracker's arsenal and that you don't have to pay extra for some separate functions.

Reporting Capabilities and Traffic Processing Speed

Once the advertising campaign is set up and launched, you need to be sure that the tracking software will process all clicks, users will see the landing pages, and you will be able to get enough analytics for further analysis and optimization of the obtained data. Detailed and informative reports will allow you to dissect your setup more thoroughly and make the right decisions for further work.

Pay attention to the fact that the tracker should be able to build reports for individual click parameters and landing/offers or their groups. Automatic calculation of all leading financial indicators and the ability to work with large data volumes is also an integral part of this functionality.
Detailed reports in the tracker.

Detailed reports in Keitaro.

If you plan to handle a large volume of incoming traffic, check the tracker's capabilities in terms of its processing speed. Keitaro Tracker can process an incoming click in 0.09* seconds, and generating a report on a million such clicks takes 1.6-1.7* seconds. This ensures stable operation and display of landing pages for all your clicks and smooth and pleasant work with subsequent reporting.

*The processing speed and report generation can be higher when using weak or substandard servers.

Data Protection in Affiliate Marketing

Competitors using spy services will try to steal your setups, extract landings and creatives, and ad network bots will scan for vulnerabilities to issue another ban on your advertising account. To solve these problems, the affiliate marketing tracking should have enough protection tools. Ensure that the tracker allows you to upload your lists of IP, user-agent, or otherwise well-configured filters to block bots. Also, integrations with special services that protect your traffic (like HideClick) are a significant advantage.

Comprehensive Documentation and Responsive Support

Advertising trackers are fairly complex tools to master, as they often possess extensive functionality. Setting up the first traffic funnels to suit your needs will take some effort. And the better the documentation is prepared and the more responsive the support is, the easier and quicker you will handle the setup and achieve the desired result.
Campaign Settings

Campaign Settings.

The Keitaro team regularly works on creating new learning guides, striving to cover all possible use cases of their clients, and online support is always ready to help within a few minutes.

Multi-user Capability

For multi-account browser users, all the advantages here are clear without any further explanations. If you want to scale up and work in a team with role distribution, you will definitely need additional users and accounts.

We won't focus much on what we find to be a comfortable and pleasant to the eye interface and support for your languages, as these are subjective factors. However, multi-currency support, availability of a dark theme, and other nice little things that Octo Browser offers will only positively affect your interaction with the product.
Traffic sources settings

Traffic sources settings.

The Keitaro tracker will without any doubt satisfy your needs for each of the points listed above. The Keitaro team has been on the market for more than seven years and is chosen by thousands of webmasters worldwide.

You can see the advantages of the Keitaro for yourself by starting a 14-day trial without any restrictions or the need to enter payment data. After the trial period all Octo Browser users can claim a 20% discount on the first Keitaro license purchase using the promo code OCTOBROWSER.

If you have any questions about the operation or setup of the tracking platform, or just want to chat, don't hesitate to write to support on our official website, or on Telegram @keitarobot.

Don't put it off. Unleash the full potential of your advertising campaigns by using all the advantages of Octo Browser and Keitaro Tracker!

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