Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 4 – Advertising

Digging Deeper

Tracking and Hosting Ads

What if you want to track your own advertising on other servers and provide reports to advertising clients that you host ads for? Well, you can put both into your definitions of ads for Summary and when doing your billing, just count yourself as a separate client. Alternately, as we mentioned in the last section, you can create a subreport that only looks at your advertisements and one that looks at all your clients’ ads (or each client’s ads). Again, subreports are covered in more detail in Lesson 8 - Examining Subsets of Traffic.

Clickthrough Tracking

Figure 4. If you have installed a clickthrough script you can use the CGI report to get clickthrough data.

Whether you set up a script or just configure your server to handle the redirections, you will begin collecting hits from it so that you log the clicks (rather than the site that the advertisement is for). You can then analyze this to determine clickthrough rates for each ad using the CGI Arguments report (Figure 4). In Randal’s script, the URL that you are redirecting to is included in the file name part of the request, so this will appear in the Source column of the report. If you then give each ad a separate CGI value, you can use the Source column to determine which client the ad is for (based on the URL it links to, e.g. ‘http://www.x-network.com/’ in Figure 4) and the Arguments column (e.g. 0001, 0002 in Figure 4) to determine which ad was used. The Hits column then tells you the number of clickthroughs the ad has had.

Because the CGI report only shows cumulative results, if you want periodic results (e.g. clickthroughs per month), you will need to archive the data at each period and determine the difference in total hits. You can do this with a spreadsheet like the one shown in the previous section or you can use the Monthly Request report to find the individual requests and their hit-count for each month.

Return on Investment

When determining the value of advertisements, it is common to use a Return on Investment ratio (ROI). You can use the detailed information you get from your web analysis, along with other business data, in a custom spreadsheet to figure your ROI. By carefully tracking the advertisements you place for your web site, product or service, and comparing your revenue to the amount spent on advertising (and other promotion) you can get an ROI ratio. It is very tricky to know exactly which factors lead to an increase or decrease in revenue for a given period, but if you are careful about making one change to your your advertising program at a time, you can see if those changes significantly affect your bottom line.

Advertising Management Tools

Summary includes basic advertising analysis tools but you can go much further. When you get more ads and more clients, you will want to be able to track impressions, clickthroughs, ratios and billing for each client, campaign and advertisement. You (or your clients) may want even more analysis. You can find most of this information in Summary and build your own reports, or you can purchase a separate tool to do this. The advantage of separate tools is that they often include delivery management systems as, so you can rotate ads, weight them, assign locations on your site, and analyze the results. Some of the more popular tools include these:

• RealMedia AdServer
• CentralAd Advertising Server
• AdCycle Content Rotation System