Tracking

The act of generating and maintaining a time history of an object's position and any other features of interest.

See audit trail.

Online advertising opens the opportunity to track audience response throughout the life of a campaign. Tracking and reporting tools can help you learn as you go, so you can refine your ad creative, placement options, and spending levels if you're not seeing the results you expect. The publisher of your ads typically will provide reports on ad impressions and clickthrough. For additional analysis of your traffic and actual customer conversion rates, you'll need to build tracking mechanisms into your website.