Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 4 – Advertising

Hosting Advertising

In addition to reports showing your ads on other sites, you can use web analytics to produce reports for advertisements that you host on your site. If your advertising clients give you images to put on your pages, you can configure Summary (again, see the Configuration section of the Summary Manual for details on this) to track these ads for the Advertisement Report. Advertising is usually charged in cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM). From the Advertising Report you can get the number of impressions (the Hits column) for each ad and bill your advertising clients accordingly.

Providing Reports to Advertising Clients

As mentioned in the last section, you can use the Monthly Advertising report to see how many hits or impressions each advertisement had for a given month. With Summary Plus and SP, you can save the report as text or a spreadsheet to start your billing from (and to archive the state of the data for your records).

Figure 3. Using spreadsheet software you can track your hosted advertising and manage billing periods.

Whether you save the report or insert the data by hand, a simple spreadsheet, such as the one in Figure 3, could be used to count the cumulative hits at each billing period (months in the example), include the payments received and calculate the amount due for each client.

Using Summary’s subreports feature, you could even create subreports for your advertising clients that show only the Advertising Report and limit the advertisements shown for each client. Using this tool your clients can log in and see immediate results of their advertising, rather than having to wait for your monthly bills. In Lesson 8 - Examining Subsets of Traffic we will talk more about how to produce different reports for different viewers.

However, if you are handle any significant volume of advertising, you will most likely be using an ad insertion or management package. These tools provide detailed statistics about impressions, clickthroughs and other quantities. In this case Summary’s reports are best used as a quick double check on the values reported by your tool. A few such packages are listed in the next section.