Review: AdWatcher ROI Tracker & Fraud Monitor

The most important aspect of advertising is tracking results. If you don't know where your sales (or leads) are coming from, you don't know whether the money you're spending is being wasted. How do you know where a sale came from? You could ask every customer to type in how they found your site. You could try to backtrack through cryptic access logs to find where each customer entered your site. Or you can use an automated system that links every purchase to its source.

AdWatcher is a Return on Investment tracker for advertising. It's offered either as a hosted service, where you log in to it on their site, or as downloadable software you can set up on your own web server. You can track any type of advertising, online and off, from pay-per-click search ads to banners. It works pretty simply:

1. Add a snippet of HTML code to the "thank you" page shown after someone fills out a form or makes a purchase from your site.
2. Create a new campaign in AdWatcher for the source you want to track. AdWatcher will prompt for information about the campaign's landing page, whether it's being paid monthly or on a per-click basis, and the costs.
3. Use the tracking URL AdWatcher will create for you in your advertising.
4. Read the reports AdWatcher generates as your advertising progresses.

AdWatcher will handle the rest. Every time someone visits your site through the tracking URL you created for an advertising campaign, a cookie is set in their browser identifying that source. When that person comes back, even days later and makes a purchase, the source of that sale is recorded.

Campaign Overview Report

For an overview of the status of all your advertising, you'll see the Campaign Overview Report. This page is laid out like a large spreadsheet, with a row for each advertising campaign and many columns with information. At a glance, you can see the numbers of clicks, leads and sales generated from each campaign. You can also see the profit, return on investment percentage, and click-to-sale ratio among other statistics.

The report can be sorted by any column to easily pick out your best or worst performing campaigns, those costing you the most money, or those producing the most sales. The report can be displayed for any number of preset date ranges, such as "last 7 days" or "this year", or a custom range typed in. Your campaigns can also be grouped and then filtered to compare a subset at once.

Individual Campaign Report

Any campaign from the overview can be clicked on for a detailed analysis. The individual campaign report contains the same statistical information the overview contained, as well as two graphs and a set of dropdowns for digging into the actual numbers behind those statistics.

A detailed listing and analysis can be generated by date, landing page, keyword or action type. The landing page report makes it easy to do split testing. You can specify multiple landing pages for an ad campaign, and people arriving through your tracking URL are sent to a random landing page from the list. Leads and sales are associated with the specific landing page the visitor was sent to so that you can test different layouts, sets of ad copy, or pricing schemes. The keyword report works with the major pay-per-click search engines including Google and Yahoo!, allowing you to learn what individual keywords are leading to sales.

From the individual report you can also ask for a full listing of the logged clicks, actions and sales for any date range. Each item will list the date of the event, the IP address of the site visitor, the original clickthrough date, the landing page the visitor came in on, the referring URL of the visit, the keyword if from a search engine, and the amount of the sale.

Fraud Monitoring

In addition to making it easy to track the results of your advertising, AdWatcher watches all of your advertising for suspicious activity. Fraudulent clicks are a growing problem for pay-per-click search engine advertisers, and have a real impact on their costs. AdWatcher detects repeated clicking from a single person, even if the clicks are spread out over several days, where a human might not notice. It also detects spikes in traffic from advertising that might indicate something unusual.

AdWatcher's fraud alerts present this information in an easy-to-read fashion, with new fraud alerts for the day on the program's homepage and detailed reports available through its reporting tab. Alerts can be sent by e-mail as they happen and thresholds can be set as to what you consider fraudulent clicks or spikes.

To help you actually recoup money lost to fraudulent clicks on pay-per-click advertising campaigns, AdWatcher can generate an e-mail report for any set of campaigns which you can then customize and send to the company you're advertising with. The report will contain a formatted listing of suspicious activity, with times, IP addresses and other relevant information.

Summary

AdWatcher gets the job done and goes a step further with its fraud monitoring. It provides all the information a marketer would want to know about the results of advertising campaigns and does so in an easy-to-use fashion. Setup is a breeze, and creating new campaigns takes just seconds. If you advertise online, I strongly believe you need the tracking power AdWatcher gives you. You'll invest your money smarter knowing exactly where those sales are coming from.