February 2005
By: Scott Switzer
www.awarez.net
For: PAN 2.1.xx/MMM 0.1.xx and MMM 0.2.xx
Not available in PAN 2.0.
Also see:
Max Media Manager 0.1 User Guide
- Post-Click Tracking, page 66
- Trackers (how to setup), page 66
Originally from the Max mailing list (with minor edits to update)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004
---------------------------
Conversion tracking consists of setting up trackers for an advertiser, and then linking trackers to particular campaigns you want to track. For example, if you are a credit card company, and you want to track how many applications get filled out as a result of your ads, you may want to put a tracker on the application confirmation page, so you can see how many 'conversions' happened as a result of people clicking on your media.
Trackers have conversion rules. A conversion rule is the amount of time after a click or a view in which a conversion can be counted. For example, if you enter a click window of 30 days, a conversion will be counted if a person clicks on an ad, then fills out a credit card form within 30 days. If he fills out an application 31 days later, it will not be counted.
Setting up trackers
1. Click on an advertiser, and select 'Tracker Overview'. This takes you to the list of trackers that belong to the advertiser.
2. Click on 'Add new tracker'. This will take you to the 'Add Tracker' screen.
3. Fill in the basic information, e.g. tracker Name and Description.
4. In the 'Default Conversion Rules' section, you select how much time by default a tracker will allow a conversion to occur. At this stage, it is a default rule. When you link the tracker to a campaign later on, you can change this time.
5. Save your changes.
You will be taken to a screen which shows all of the campaigns that an advertiser has available, which can be linked to this tracker. (Note that if there are no campaigns on the 'Linked campaigns' screen, you need to add campaigns for the advertiser). Select which campaigns you wish to link on this screen. After selecting the campaigns, you have the opportunity to modify the default click and view windows from the tracker for the specific campaign. Also, you have an opportunity to 'Log' the tracker. Basically, all trackers which have the 'log' button checked will show up on the statistics screens. You may not want all tracker conversions to show up on statistics. For example, suppose you want to put a tracker beacon on every page of a 5 page credit card application, so that you can measure drop-off rates. You probably only want to log the last tracker beacon (the one on the confirmation page), because that is how you pay your affiliates. The 'log' checkbox gives you this functionality. Save your changes.
The next tab is the 'Tracker Variables' screen. Tracker Variables give you the opportunity to log information that is unique to the specific conversion. For example, if you are a book store and are tracking sales, you can set up a tracker variable to log the amount of sale. If you want this functionality, click on the 'Add Variable' button on the far right side of the screen. The name of the variable should correspond with the name of the variable you want to track. For example, if you are tracking the amount of sale, and there is a javascript variable on the page which contains this information called 'basket_value', this should be the name of the variable. In the 'Variable Type' field, you can choose either 'Javascript' or 'Querystring'. Javascript will go to the page and get the value of a javascript variable.
For example, the following code will generate a tracker beacon which will then return to pick up the value of 'basket_value'. The Querystring value will take any variables which are passed into the Querystring of the tracker code and log them as tracker variables.
CODE
<html>
<body>
<script language='JavaScript'>
<!--
var basket_value = '10.99';
//-->
</script>
(text of web page)
(text of tracker beacon)
<script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript'>
<!--
var az_r = Math.floor(Math.random()*999999);
var az_p = location.protocol.indexOf('https:')>-1?'https:':'http:';
document.write ("<" + "script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript' src='");
document.write (az_p+"//(my_adserver)/adconversionjs.php?trackerid=1&r="+az_r);
document.write ("'><" + "/script>");
//-->
</script>
</body>
</html>
<body>
<script language='JavaScript'>
<!--
var basket_value = '10.99';
//-->
</script>
(text of web page)
(text of tracker beacon)
<script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript'>
<!--
var az_r = Math.floor(Math.random()*999999);
var az_p = location.protocol.indexOf('https:')>-1?'https:':'http:';
document.write ("<" + "script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript' src='");
document.write (az_p+"//(my_adserver)/adconversionjs.php?trackerid=1&r="+az_r);
document.write ("'><" + "/script>");
//-->
</script>
</body>
</html>
Now, you are ready to generate code. Note that if you are using Javascript tracker variables, you MUST generate a javascript invocation code. If you are not using variables, or using querystring variables, either code will work, according to your specific requirements. Javascript works on slightly less browsers, but it is better against proxy servers (e.g. cache busting), and it can dynamically adjust itself if you are on a secure page (so you do not get any warning popups!). Image tags are very straightforward, and faster to load.
Now that all of this is set up, you are ready to view statistics! On most statistics screens, conversions and conversion ratio (SR) are to the right of Clicks and CTR. Conversion ratio is the number of conversions divided by the number of clicks. This may not make sense on campaigns in which view tracking is enabled rather than click tracking, but we had to make a choice!
Frequently Asked Question (yes, there is only one question):
Why do I not see any conversions?
a) Is a properly generated tracker tag put in the screen? If you gave the tracker tag to a customer, did they update the web page inadvertently remove the tag?
b) Did you remember to link a campaign to the tracker? Are you sure that the media that you are running is part of the linked campaign?
c) Did you check the 'Log' box on the 'Linked campaigns' screen? If you did not, then conversions are probably still happening, but they are not showing up on the statistics screens (becuase you did not want them to!). You can check that 'unreported' conversions are happening by looking if rows in the 'conversionlog' table are appearing.
d) Are you running maintenance on an hourly basis? Conversion reporting is done
during maintenance, they will not appear if you are not running maintenance.
e) Do you have a high volume site, and have 30 day view tracking turned on? Conversion tracking is fairly labour intensive, and view tracking needs over 1000 times more horsepower than click tracking. If you see maintenance becoming quite slow, you may want to limit the number of campaigns (and the view window) that use view tracking. Just think about what maintenance is trying to do for a view window of 30 days - for every single tracker impression, it needs to look at 30 days' worth of views to see if it can match the cookie ID of the tracker to the view! If your site does 1 million views per day, and you have 100 tracker impressions per hour, it needs to process 3 BILLION combinations per hour! Much time (Andrew can attest) has been spent on optimising this query, and we have made it many orders of magnitude faster, but it is still one of the most resource intensive chores that the ad server must do.
Hopefully, this will get you a long way down the 'conversion tracking' path.
Please post additional questions here in the forums
Scott