Ad tracking software
Ad tracking software, explained by what it does to a click.
Ad tracking software sits between the money you spend and the money you make, and tells you which parts of the first produced the second. Everything else it does is in service of that.
An ad platform will tell you how many conversions it thinks it caused. An affiliate network will tell you what it paid you. Neither of them knows what the other did, and both have a reason to count generously. A tracker is the third party that holds one record of what happened: this click, from this placement, cost this much, went to this page, and became this sale nine hours later.
The mechanism is old and simple. Your ad points at a link on a domain you own. That link records the click and sends the visitor on, in a few tens of milliseconds. When a sale happens, the network calls a URL you gave it — a postback — carrying the id of the click that caused it. The tracker joins the two.
What separates tools is not that mechanism. It is how fast the redirect answers, whether the tracker can tell a bot from a buyer, how it bills you, and how much it will still tell you in six months when the question is about last quarter.
How it works
The mechanism, not the marketing.
- 01
The click arrives
Somebody taps your ad. The network sends them to your tracking link with its own tokens attached.
- 02
It is described and scored
Country, network, device and connection are resolved, and signals are weighed to decide whether this is a person.
- 03
It is routed
Rules and weights choose the landing page or offer, and the visitor is sent there.
- 04
The sale ties back
The network calls your postback with the click id, days later if need be, and the record closes.
What to check tonight
You can do all of this without us.
None of it needs an account anywhere. If it turns out your tracking is fine, you have lost twenty minutes and learned something.
Time the redirect from where your traffic is
Open your tracking link from a phone on mobile data in the country you buy in. Anything over about a second is costing you visitors before your page even loads.
Count what the tracker bills
Take one converting visitor and count how many billable events they generate. Some trackers charge for the ad click, the landing-page click, the conversion, and the postback back to the ad platform. One visitor, four charges.
Ask what happens when the tracker is down
The answer should be that the link still redirects and the click is delivered later. If the answer is that your traffic stops, you are buying a single point of failure for your whole media budget.
Look at the retention on the plan you would buy
Entry plans often keep a month or three of click history. A conversion that lands late, or a question in January about November, needs the click to still exist.
How UTMCAP does it
What you would get here.
One click, one charge
The click we bill is the one the redirect answers. The lander click, the conversion and the send-back to the ad platform cost nothing.
Answered at the edge
In about 300 cities rather than one. Half of the 25 countries we measure every week are answered within 37 ms.
Bot filtering included
Twenty-one signals, a threshold you set, and the reason kept in words on every filtered click.
Cost and revenue in one place
Spend pulled by API from twelve platforms, payouts arriving by postback from 39 networks, joined on the click.
Reports that go five levels deep
Forty fields to group by, so the zone inside the country inside the campaign is one report rather than four exports.
Free to try properly
100,000 clicks a month with no card, not a fortnight’s trial.
Questions
The ones people ask next.
Read next
- Do I need a tracker if the ad platform already reports conversions?
- If you buy on one platform, sell one product and never wonder which placement paid, probably not. The moment you have two sources, a lander between the ad and the offer, or a network that pays days later, the platforms disagree and somebody has to hold the real record.
- What is the difference between this and Google Analytics?
- Analytics tells you about sessions on your website. A tracker tells you about money on a click: what it cost, where it came from at zone level, whether it was a bot, and what it eventually paid. They answer different questions and most buyers need the second.
- How much does ad tracking software cost?
- Hosted trackers start from about $29 to $119 a month for roughly a million units, depending on what they count as a unit. Self-hosted licences start around $40 to $149 plus your own server. Ours is free for 100,000 clicks a month and $29 for a million.
Point a domain at us and run a click through it.
The free plan takes a hundred thousand clicks a month and no card. If it does not do what you need, you have lost twenty minutes.