Experienced affiliates know that focusing their campaign properly can make the difference between earning a little and a lot of money. And its impossible to focus a campaign properly without detailed information. This kind of information comes from a program called an ad tracker. You can buy and install a program to track ads or use a service to gather the results for you.

An ad tracker is software that gives you the ability to catalog all the clicks made on your site that resulted in a link to a merchant site. These can be pay-for-performance affiliate programs, pay-per-click, or even programs that rely on pop-ups or pop-unders. You can even track links to merchants that you have placed in emails, ezines and online newsletters. By using ad tracking, you will be able to tell exactly where you placed the link that resulted in a click-through to a merchant on your site or off.

The software will help you in deciding which vendors are more productive than others, and give you the ability to make changes on a regular basis. You can tell which pages of your site work better than others, and you can even experiment with locating banner or other ads on different portions of a page. Since advertising began, in the offline world, advertisers have wanted better ways of determining what is working and what isnt. Huge sums of money have been spent and opportunities lost because nobody knew what was working and what wasnt. Now, as an affiliate you have the ability to proactively tweak and manage and get the most profit from your site use it often and well.