Is Tracking AdSense or Ad clicks Good or Bad?

First, for people who didn’t knew that AdSense or other Ad clicks can be tracked, it’s possible with tons of such solutions already available on Internet. These solutions can effectively track the clicks on your AdSense ads. A simple Google search on ‘Track AdSense Clicks’, will produce lot of results to help you choose any of the available solutions to track the AdSense clicks.

Now, for people who want to track such clicks, there are few things to think about. Is tracking ad clicks good or a bad thing to do? Answer to this question should be available to you in few more minutes, after you complete reading this post.

An insider into how ad click tracking works!

Every ad showing program that publishers like us use on our site, has a landing page. So, if a user clicks on an ad on your site, he will be taken to a landing page on some remote website or your own website (if you serve internal Ads). To track those ad clicks, you will need to have some sort of solution on your pages that will track the outbound clicks to advertiser’s site. This is a little different when it comes to ad programs like AdSense where all the clicks will first go to Google’s website and then quickly redirect to advertiser’s website or a landing page. Google does this to record clicks from your website.

To track outbound clicks from AdSense served ads, you will have to track outgoing clicks to googlesyndication.com. Since you can not track these clicks using a server side script since the ads are clicked in the client’s browser, some sort of script must be used at the client side to track such clicks. Javacript based scripts are best for tracking such outbound clicks.

Companies or individuals offering solutions to tracks ad clicks have two types of solutions to accomplish this. First type of solution will place a Javascript on your site and track the clicks on a third party website such as website of the company offering the free or a paid solution. They will then be able to show you the click metrics on their web site. Second type of solution requires that you install or place [copy and paste] Javascript on your site and the clicks are recorded in a database on your site itself. The metrics are recorded and available from your site itself. The second type of solution does not transmit any data from your site to any third party website.

Advantages of tracking ad clicks using both types of ad click tracking solutions

The main advantages of implementing an ad click tracking solution on your site are:

• Ability to track exact number of ad clicks on your site, including sub domains and all pages of your site.
• Accurate reporting on number of ads clicked and pages they were clicked from and
• A reporting system to show you some data about the how pages perform on your site.

Disadvantages of tracking ad clicks with programs that record information remotely?

Read this section carefully. The following are the disadvantages of using such ad tracking programs that records all click data on either a third party website or the website of the company offering such programs:

• Information about your pages with highest performance is available to other companies.
• Best performing Keywords and keyterms of your site is also available to them.
• Your search engine ranking and the keywords that make you perform well is easy to derive from such recorded data. Since the click data is being recorded remotely, such key information about your site is much easier to find from the collected data.
• Historical reports about your site’s best performing pages, keywords, search engine ranking can be easily used by your competitors to create similar pages and compete with you.

Conclusion: We don’t say that the companies offering solutions to track your AdSense or other ad clicks on their website and offer free stats will reveal important information to other party companies. But before you sign-up to implement such solutions where your click tracking information is hosted remotely, obtain clarification from those companies about what they will do with the recorded data from your website. If you already use such solutions, read the Terms and Conditions of your solution provider and ensure that the recorded information is not shared or sold to other companies. A program that will record all such information in your database without a need of having it transmitted to a remote server is what we recommend in a long term. After all, it requires lot of hard work to make it to the top of search engine results and stay there. Isn’t it?

Related: How to make money with AdSense?