Ad Serving And Ad Tracking

141 Comments / Advertising Dictionary / By Content Team

Ad Serving And Ad Tracking

Understanding the difference between ad serving and ad tracking is crucial in the world of digital advertising. While both play important roles in the success of online campaigns, they serve distinct purposes.

Ad serving refers to the process of delivering ads to targeted audiences on various platforms such as websites, mobile apps, or social media channels. It involves technology that ensures ads are displayed correctly and efficiently to reach the intended audience. Ad serving platforms use algorithms to determine which ads to display based on factors like user demographics, browsing behavior, and contextual relevance.

On the other hand, ad tracking focuses on monitoring and analyzing the performance of advertisements once they have been served. It involves tracking metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions, and engagement rates. Ad tracking allows advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and make data-driven decisions for optimization.

While ad serving is primarily concerned with delivering ads at scale and reaching target audiences effectively, ad tracking provides valuable insights into how well those ads are performing and whether they are achieving desired outcomes.

In summary, ad serving ensures that ads are delivered to specific audiences through various platforms while ad tracking measures their performance and helps advertisers optimize their campaigns for better results. Both processes work hand in hand to maximize the impact of digital advertising efforts.

Types of Ad Tracking:

Effective ad tracking requires a variety of data on user activity. To gather the necessary info, companies use different types of ad tracking. Some focus on general web activity, whereas others get specific and analyze your every movement.

Link Tracking: It is the most simple yet most useful for tracking. It helps businesses to track who clicked or shared your links and gain useful information.

Affiliate Link Tracking: This form is used for affiliate programs, providing a tracking source of shared links and rewards affiliate networks.

Pixel Tracking: A tracking pixel provides information about customer behavior, the number of people viewing your ads, the duration of time they viewed it, and the number of clicks.

Facebook Ad Tracking: Facebook pixel helps offer valuable insights into Facebook ads and helps to create more targeted and relevant ads. It boosts Facebook advertising ROI.

Cookies: Cookies collect user activity or behavior on the website and help create retargeted ads.

Why Do Companies Collect Data:

For online advertising, companies use collected data to help improve ad campaigns and target you with personalized ads. Collected data gives companies insight into the efficacy of their ads. Collected data also help companies narrow down ad campaigns to specific groups of customers.

Companies can get user data from the platforms they advertise on. Or they can integrate data audience insight tools directly onto their websites. Some of these tools include Google Analytics and Social Plugins by Facebook.

Data brokers, who collect and sell user data are another source of where companies look for user data. Data brokers gather data wholesale, create some semblance of a user profile, then sell it for profit.