The ability to effectively measure your return on investment is vital for getting the most from advertising spends and affiliate marketing programs. For example, today’s multipronged sales approaches mean that a referred customer may have seen both a paid search listing and followed an affiliate link — but which source should receive the credit?

“Give credit where credit is due,” says Convertro (www.convertro.com), an advanced tool for measuring the actual results of your marketing efforts, without relying on flawed last-click metrics or other simple measures. Instead, Convertro provides a universal tag designed to replace all internal and thirdparty tags for ad tracking and more.

“Today’s fragmented digital marketing landscape mandates hundreds of partnerships for data and revenue sharing, causing huge maintenance nightmares for your IT departments,” states a Convertro rep. “By deploying a single yet simple tag on each page, you gain access to a very powerful universal tag management system [that allows users] to add, remove, and edit tags without having to edit actual web pages.”

This simple Dashboard interface is a boon for non-technical operators, yet provides an accurate and comprehensive view of your site’s marketing infrastructure.

“Using technologies beyond basic cookie tracking, Convertro is able to provide a richer data set that is not subject to problems that plague cookies, such as deletion, expiration, cross-domain or cross-browser issues,” the spokesperson added.

‘Convertro provides advertisers enhanced transparency into the effectiveness of their marketing channels by tracking many more customerinitiated marketing interactions than possible with conventional approaches, including the ability to correlate sales completed offline with the online marketing channels driving the sale.”

Convertro says that its data can be used to allocate revenues throughout the purchase funnel, including to upstream assist keywords; and it can also facilitate dynamic bids on ad auctions for retargeting purposes.

“Convertro can be used to justify spend on marketing channels that are in the middle of long sales cycles [and] fairly credit marketing partners, rather than crediting multiple partners for the same conversion event,” the spokesperson added, explaining that the software can also identify affiliates that violate your program’s terms; for example, by using unauthorized software or prohibited search phrases.

User-specific landing pages and customized rule sets for revenue attribution, plus full integration with stats and bid optimization tools such as Google Analytics and Adwords, further expand the usefulness of Convertro, which some users credit for a 30 percent rise in their conversion rates — a number that any marketer would find appealing.