There's an old adage in the internet marketing world that most people learning the business learn much too late - you can not improve what you can not measure. This is especially true with tracking and measuring the traffic that comes to your website. In order to be a successful internet marketer, you need to find and employ the tools that track and measure the traffic that comes to your site. After all, the traffic (people) that are visiting your site is its life-blood - the way to do this is traffic tracking, also known as ad tracking.

Ad Tracking Basics

Understanding the basics of ad tracking will help you see the value in the process - ad tracking is monitoring and measuring the traffic that is coming to your website from various sources. To use ad tracking to its fullest capacity, you should create unique tracking links for each traffic source, such as for your banner ads, articles, PPC ads, email newsletters, and more.When the traffic comes to your website from that source via the link that you created with ad tracker, it's displayed on your visitor statistics or traffic dashboard.

The Importance of Ad Tracking

Anyone can get traffic to their website - this much is easy. What is difficult is getting traffic to come to your website that makes money for you. Not all traffic is equal, you need targeted traffic. Targeted traffic is a high percentage of visitors that are truly interested in what you're offering, right down to the exact niche. These are the buyers, the people who will butter your bread and make you money.

Two components of Ad Tracking

1. Amount of Traffic
2. Value of the Traffic

These two components are integral to your website making money for you. The more targeted your traffic is, and the more traffic you have that is targeted to your niche, the more money you'll make.

The amount of traffic to your website is easy to track and measure - the value of that traffic is determined by the percentage of that traffic that makes a purchase (conversion rate). This means you'll have to track where your traffic is coming from to find out its value. This is usually done with conversion and tracking software applications that are connected to your website.

For more information about ad tracking visit my Ad Tracking lens on Squidoo.