How to effectively track ads?

[Jack Norton]

I've tried some advertising in the past on various sites - but I always faced the same problem: how to track the results? :)
So was wondering if anyone here has any bullet-proof (well, almost) to track if ads on site XYZ was good, exceptional, or crap? I suppose would be a mix of php and cookies? or the only solution is to buy one of those expensive tracking systems?
I gave up buying ads without knowing if REALLY works, and as you might know, same site can give great result for one kind of game and bad for another... so a tracking system is really a necessity.

If anyone want to share what they use, would be welcome!

[Olivier]

I believe Google Analytics has great stuff to track ad campaigns, with lots of parameters. Never really used it for anything else than tracking traffic, but you should give it a try.
I think that Google Analytics, before being bought by Google, was an expensive tracking system.

[Jack Norton]

Thanks for the reply. But it works only with adwords? or is a general tracking tool?

[mokkbs]

BMTMicro gives you the IP the game was purchased from in their DB. (I don't know if Plumus does or if any others do).

If you take your weblogs and cross reference the IP's in your DB, you can get a good feel for where your purchases are coming from based on the referers in your weblog. This technique has been useful to me.

It is, of course, not entirely scientific, as some users change their IPs everytime they turn their machines on.

--Mark

[Olivier]

Thanks for the reply. But it works only with adwords? or is a general tracking tool?
GA is integrated with adwords but yes, it's also a general tracking tool. I didn't went very deep in the process, but I think you can track almost anything with it, ad campaigns and newsletter campaigns among others.
As many similar tools it is based on cookies, so if you can pass their values to your payment processor's order page, then you can get something nifty. To do that your ingame buy buttons should link to a page at your website, then that webpage would redirect people to your payment processor's order page.
When I first logged into my GA account I must say that I was overwhelmed by the amount of data available, but if you take some time I believe you can get very much out of that complex yet professional tool.

[Fost]

Write a cookie out containing either the stripped out domain part of the referrer, or an get request id you've embedded in the link, or both. Pass this through on a sale.

We track about 90% of results that way, and frankly would have been out of business a long time ago without the data the system collects.

[Jack Norton]

Yes that was exactly what I was thinking to do. Unfortunately my php skill sucks a bit :) but I guess asking to post "example code" would be too much. Hm maybe I'll hire someone on rentacoder to do that for $50 !

[lakibuk]

Write a cookie out containing either the stripped out domain part of the referrer, or an get request id you've embedded in the link, or both. Pass this through on a sale.
If i understand your method, you pass the ID on to the reg service. Can you do this with reg services?

[Fost]

setting and reading a cookie called 'mycookiename' that contains the domain of the referring page using php:

write a cookie (this needs to be the first thing you do in a php page as even writing out a space will cause php to output headers first (a cookie needs to be set in the headers)
if (!$_COOKIE['mycookiename']) /* check tracker cookie already exists, else make a new one*/
{
// get domain part from referrer url
preg_match("/^(http:\/\/)?([^\/]+)/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $matches);
if ($matches[1] == 'http://') $referrer .= substr(trim($matches[2]),0,50);
else $referrer = 'n'; //no referrer (customer came directly to site)

//Set how long you want this cookie to survive in seconds. This sets a year in seconds)
$exp_time = (time() + 31536000);

/*write the cookie on the visitor's machine.
Note, you will only be able to read it back from the domain set.
*/
setcookie('mycookiename',$referrer, $exp_time,'/','.mydomain.com');
}

read the cookie in - pretty straightforward - all cookies appear in php's built in array '$_COOKIE'

$myvariablename = $_COOKIE['mycookiename'];

so you just need to echo that out into some value however you pass it through to your payment processor.

Remember, some browsers or firewalls block cookies, so you won't get 100% success rate. Also, it may be worth outputting a compact privacy policy first, as ie is less likely to block it with higher security set if you have one (not so sure about ie7)

we use this line before the cookie is written out:

header('P3P: CP="NOI DSP IVAo OUR IND NAV"');

[Fost]

If i understand your method, you pass the ID on to the reg service. Can you do this with reg services?

Most have some way to pass through some arbitrary data. We are using swreg, where you just add 't=mydata' onto the buy url . E.g, here's our buy link:

http://usd.swreg.org/cgi-bin/s.cgi?s=31751&clr=1&p=317511&v=0&lang=dlonly&d=0&q=1&t=new,NO,n,n

the t= bit adds a couple of bits of data separated by a comma. If I had a cookie set with the referrer in, one of the values would be the referring domain.

We also scramble the data a little so it isn't obvious we are sending mad data down the line, but I'm not sure that really matters.

[zoombapup]

Huh? isnt this changing into two questions now?

1) How do I know my advertising is working
2) How do I track where people buy from

The two arent necassarily linked are they? I mean, for instance, I could have an ad that simply draws people to my product page for my latest game. So I could simply track that with GA or OpenTracker.net or something.

What is the purpose of the whole tracking of where people buy from? Is that when they have a direct link to your purchase page? If thats so, then does it mean you are sending them straight to the payment processor or are they hitting a landing page on your site first and THEN going there.

So surely you just have a parameter on the ad link that incorporates a generated guid?

Whats the reasoning for doing it through to the payment process other than to track sales completions for a given ad?

Its weirdly interesting to me, not that I have anything to sell :)

[soniCron]

The "right" way to track ad turnover is to track when a user clicks through the ad, store a cookie (or better, embed a unique ID into the installer,) then track whether that ad link resulted in a purchase. It's a twofold process, otherwise you don't know where your money is going.

[Fost]

What is the purpose of the whole tracking of where people buy from? Is that when they have a direct link to your purchase page? If that's so, then does it mean you are sending them straight to the payment processor or are they hitting a landing page on your site first and THEN going there.

Every single page on our site tracks referrers, so all we need to do is point an advert at our website and it does the rest. If a customer buys anything, then we pass that through. Every day, the site emails us the sales and where they came from, and we also have pages that pull that data out based on months or date ranges, so we can see what websites made us money that month. You can see ads work (when they rarely do!), monitor their inevitable performance drop, and also find websites giving you random sales and see if you can make better use of them (e.g: I have found forums giving us sales, and then offered the site in question a review copy, that gave us some more. That would not have happened without some form of tracking).


General site analysis such as visitor paths and clickthrough rates I find better handled by something like Google Analytics, but the referrer tracking was a business changing moment for us and I wish we'd done it sooner.