Ad Tracking: A Practical Guide

Ad tracking measures what happens after marketing traffic is generated and connects outcomes back to campaigns, ads or sources.

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What ad tracking answers

A useful setup should help answer where a visit came from, what the visitor did, whether a conversion occurred and which campaign deserves credit.

Tracking vs attribution

Tracking records events and journeys. Attribution applies rules for assigning conversion credit.

A basic tracking stack

A practical stack usually includes consistent campaign parameters, website/funnel tracking, conversion events and reporting.

When specialist software becomes useful

Specialist software becomes more valuable as paid spend, channels, funnel complexity and the cost of attribution mistakes increase.