New generation of satellite navigation signals, such as AltBOC (Alternative Binary Offset Keying), CBOC (Composite Binary Offset Keying) and TMBOC (Time Multiplex Binary Offset Keying) bring enhancements in the tracking process, such as more signal power, better multipath mitigation capabilities and more robust navigation. Moreover, one of the most important improvement they bring into the GNSS story is the presence of the two channels: data and pilot. The pilot channel, although dataless, carries the same information about the frequency, carrier and code phase as the data channel.Therefore, the information from both channels can be used to improve the tracking performance. In this context, the main point that is addressed in this paper is the optimization of the data/pilot combining tracking strategies in order to increase tracking stability, accuracy and robustness. Towards this end, non-coherent and coherent data/pilot combining strategies with different weights on each channel are presented, and the outputs from the DLL and PLL tracking loops using different discriminator types are analyzed and discussed. Moreover, an investigation for an optimal trade-off between the minimal tracking error and the best stability is reported with the corresponding results discussed. © 2011 IEEE.