Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 4 – Advertising

Tracking Advertising

When tracking advertising, there are two concepts you may be considering. First is finding out statistics for your ads that may be hosted on other sites. We will be discussing that in this section. In the next section we will discuss how to produce reports of advertisements you host on your site for other people.

My Ads on Other Sites

The only way that you can count the number of times your ad has been viewed is by making sure that it is always requested from your server. This means that if your ads are hosted on another site, you cannot simply send them an image. You must provide them a URL that links back to your server. This way whenever the ad is requested, the request will go to your server and your logs will record it. (Actually, the request is usually proxied by the advertising hosting company so they can manage delivery and analysis as well.)

If you provide a URL to each of your ads, then you can configure Summary to count each of these as an Ad for the Advertising Report (see the Configuration section of the Summary Manual for details.) Your Advertising Report will then list the number of hits (or impressions) that each ad received. Note that Summary shows the total (cumulative) hits, and the recent hits (the last two to three weeks). You will want to know the number of hits for each ad per month. The Monthly Ads report makes it simple to gather this information. You may want to record it in a separate location for archival and lookup purposes.

Figure 2. The Referrer Report can help you decide where to place ads most effectively.

Improving Advertising Performances

To make your advertising most effective, you will want to place ads on pages that are likely to send you qualified users. In Lesson 2 - Where Are My Visitors Coming From?, we discussed how to use the Referrer Report (Figure 2) to find qualified leads of visitors. You can use the same information to decide which pages would be good places to place an advertisement. If a site had a large number of hits in the past (Hits column is high) but the Percent of Recent Hits is low, then you might want to place an ad there to get more attention. There may be some pages listed that have never performed well, but you think should – perhaps your link is not prominent enough. You can look into placing ads on those pages too. And the pages that drive the most traffic could send even more with an ad. You will need to evaluate the content of the page, the historical trend of the referrer (the Referrers Over Time report is good for that) and do some testing to see which ones work best for you. You can also use Summary’s Goal and Value visits to assign a quality to visits. Using these qualities, you can asses the value of your advertisements based on a desirable outcome of the visit (Goal) or a potential revenue generated by it (Value). These two concepts are covered in greater detail in Lesson 9 - Incorporating Business Goals and Lesson 5 - Revenue Modeling, respectively.