In my opinion, the best way to track online advertising campaigns is to combine the information gained from web statistics tools with the information from third party ad campaign tools. I say this for a few reasons.
As a programmer, I love data projects! However, I also value efficiency. I could technically write program code to read in the data from web server logs, format it into tables, create queries and develop reports with graphs. It would be a feasible project. However, my time is expensive and this task has already been done many, many times. Why would I write the same code if I could purchase it (already debugged) for a reasonable price? Needless to say, many ISP's offer this service free of charge! I would be a fool not to tell you this.
I have similar feelings about third-party ad tracking campaign tools. These typically are not free but are well worth the minimal investment for the specialized information you receive in formats you can use and understand. These tools create specialized views of your campaign results, unique visits, clicks, actions, purchases and a variety of custom configured activities. They key here is the unique visit or user session. Many programs count hits not unique visits. Hits are a completely arbitrary figure. They include all the images contained within one web page, web browser refreshes and other web server hit data that is not relevant. Hits do not take user session state into consideration. For example, one web page with four images would be considered five hits on a web server when in reality there was only one user session. User session is imperative – hits are bogus. My point here is that these programs were coded to take into account the oddities of web marketing and can give you a very specialized picture of your campaign.
Web statistics programs and ad campaign managers contain different views of web site data. The former gives you an overall picture of your web site activity and the latter gives you an accurate idea for return on investment of an individual ad campaign. With the advent of specialized web campaign tracking programs tailored meet the unique reporting needs of marketing professionals, structuring and reporting results in financial terms a business organization understands for tactical decision making is much, much easier! If you are still importing server log data into a spreadsheet or database and creating queries – STOP! Unless you are the type of person that enjoys typing on a typewriter rather than taking advantage of a word processing program, then using web statistics tools in conjunction with ad campaign managers is hands-down the best approach for tracking results for your online marketing efforts!
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