Do you own an online business? Then you most probably already know that the lifeline of your business is dependent on how much traffic it gets. And to get traffic, you must advertise.

When it comes to advertising, an expert marketer knows that there is no one "magic" ad that brings in all the desired traffic, more often, estimating the effectiveness of a particular ad often involves testing and re-testing. Also, the marketer knows that for maximum exposure, several ads and traffic sources have to be sought after.

That's quite true, there is no such thing as "the best ad ever", but we can rightly term a particular ad as being effective or good. Fact is, any ad can always be improved upon and made better.

Now, for your business to succeed, advertising dollars have to be utilized effectively for maximum output. If you know what you are doing, and you know your numbers well, you will always be on the look out for more ads as you know you are making profit.

If you don't, then these may be costing you hundreds or thousands of dollars without nothing to show for it, that will be money down the drain. Money spent on advertising can be seen as being two edged with the capacity to either grow your business and explode your profits or frustrate it.

There are various ad types and traffic media that you can invest your ad dollars into. Some cheap, some not so cheap; some effective, some not so effective. Th most important factor you should take into consideration when testing and re-testing any ad or traffic source is the "lead rate" of the ad.

Simply put, the lead rate of an ad is the number of leads brought in per dollar spent on that ad. To calculate this value, one has to estimate the total number of leads a particular ad or traffic source brings over a fixed period of time and divide it by the total amount of dollars spent on that ad in that same period of time. The result is your lead rate.

Now, this is where the problem lies. It could be quite hectic if not impossible to manually monitor a particular ad and manually estimate the amount of traffic it brings, hence the importance of a good ad tracker.

A good and effective ad tracker, among other benefits, will at the click of a button, comprehensively report to you live stats of each ad you spent dollars on. It automatically monitors your ads and reports back to you, it's findings. Then, you can now determine your lead rate and know which traffic sources or ads are bringing in the most leads.

There are many off the shelf trackers which can do this. However, most are difficult to maintain and understand because they are normally manually operated.

Generally though, I think a good ad tracker should be in the form of an "ad tracking online platform" that runs 24/7 which is automated and where you can easily access your live stats for each traffic source and hence, determine their effectiveness.