Tracking Advertising Performance

[wizardsandwars]

I've always like the 'Ad Tracker' mod that lets me see where my customers were comming from, but I was never easily able to tell how many sales were comming from each advertiser.

 

The answer turned out to be obvious.

 

I installed the affiliate program, and I enrolled each advertiser into the program seperatly, with a 0 percent commission rate.. Then I changed the 'Ad Tracker' from looking for 'ad=' to 'ref='.

 

Now every time I advertise somewhere, my urls apend the ref= with the referral ID number assigned by the afilliate program, so they look like this.

 

http://yourdomain.com?ref=20011

 

So now I can see what customers are coming from where, how many clicks I get from each advertiser, how many sales I get from each advertiser, and what the conversion rate is.

 

It's making my marketing life so much easier.

[LeeH]

This is interesting...'though I haven't looked at them closely, I've assumed the various affiliate contributions were for signing us affiliates..not managing inbound hits from site from which the store owner is an affiliate of someone else's site. Which affiliate mod did you install? i saw several & was hoping you could post a link to the one you used.

 

Thanks

I've always like the 'Ad Tracker' mod that lets me see where my customers were comming from, but I was never easily able to tell how many sales were comming from each advertiser.

 

The answer turned out to be obvious.

 

I installed the affiliate program, and I enrolled each advertiser into the program seperatly, with a 0 percent commission rate.. Then I changed the 'Ad Tracker' from looking for 'ad=' to 'ref='.

 

Now every time I advertise somewhere, my urls apend the ref= with the referral ID number assigned by the afilliate program, so they look like this.

 

http://yourdomain.com?ref=20011

 

So now I can see what customers are coming from where, how many clicks I get from each advertiser, how many sales I get from each advertiser, and what the conversion rate is.

 

It's making my marketing life so much easier.

[wizardsandwars]

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contri...ons,158/page,10

[LeeH]

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contri...ons,158/page,10

[CodeConfused]

this is an incredibly good idea :D

thanks for posting this!

 

Dan

[sabotage79]

This should be great -

Do I need to install the 'Ad Tracker' as well as the OSC Affiliate mod? Are you saying that when someone clicks on an ad, say from Google (the link being www.mysite.com) OSA will automaticly append the ref=xxx to the url?

Do I then use the OSA Admin Summary to see the results?

 

I dont have 'Ad Tracker' or OSA so im not totally sure how this works.

 

Thanks!! :)

[wizardsandwars]

Do I need to install the 'Ad Tracker' as well as the OSC Affiliate mod?

I would. The ad tracker will tell you what customers came from where. It also stores the referring url in the customers table. This is one of my favority mods.

 

 

 

Are you saying that when someone clicks on an ad, say from Google (the link being www.mysite.com) OSA will automaticly append the ref=xxx to the url?

No. You would put the ref=xxx on the url yourself. So if you were advertising on Google adwords, the clickthrough url that you provide would have the ref= appended to the end of if. That way when someone clicks on that url, OSC can track it.

 

Do I then use the OSA Admin Summary to see the results?

Yes. The OSC Affiliate program has an admin feature that allows you to view the results.

 

HTH

[CodeConfused]

and to make the Ad Tracker look for "ref" instead of "ad", you do the following (i think, at least, :D so please remember to backup your files before applying my thoughts):

 

the Ad Tracker instructions readme file says in it posint "4)", that one should UPDATE /catalog/includes/application_top.php as follows:

 

Add the following

Place AFTER "tep_session_start();"



// Updated for PHP 3.4.x

//user_tracking modications

 if (!$referer_url) {

	 if ($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_REFERER']) {

   $referer_url = $HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_REFERER'];

   tep_session_register('referer_url');

}

 }



//user_ad_tracker modification

 if ($ad) {

     $advertiser = $_GET["ad"];  

     tep_session_register('advertiser');      

  }

 

in the line above where it says

 

      $advertiser = $_GET["ad"];  

 

you would write the following instead:

 

      $advertiser = $_GET["ref"];  

 

again, please backup your files first, as I'm a newbie myself, and not very PHP experienced :D

[sabotage79]

The Affiliates mod is great - I had a question though

 

If I use WizardsnWars idea to track ad campains, can I still use it for normal Affiliates?

Would my results be blasted with search engine click ad results? Or can you seperate those.. It will make more sense when I get time to configure it - Normal Affiliate features work great though - im on a 010303 snap.

[leolll]

Could somebody provide more details on this. It sounds really cool, but I'm not quite sure what it all takes. Thanks

[chain]

Hey,

 

Wow! I was thinking about making a whole Affiliate Program from scratch but this will save me so much time! Just curious wizardandwars but what is your website?

[wizardsandwars]

I use it for both Regular Affiliates, and advertisers.

 

Works great.

[wizardsandwars]

Just curious wizardandwars but what is your website?

www.wizardsandwars.com

[talon177]

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contri...ons,158/page,10

 

Hi, I was wondering where could you find "adtracker" on that page? While looking I wasn't sure which module it was, could someone give me the date of that one, also I was wondering if this would work for 2.2 Milestone 2?

 

Thanks.

[TB]

A quick search for 'tracker' in the contribution search box revealed this:

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,583

 

The search boxes are your friends... don't be scared of them.

[wizardsandwars]

I was wondering where could you find "adtracker" on that page?

 

In addition ot Tony's insight, I'd like to point out that if you read hte entire thread, you'll see the that link *was not* supposed to point to the 'ad Tracker', but rather to the "OSC Affiliate Program", which as I explained at the beginning of the thread, is a great way to trazck advertising campaigns.

[cgchris99]

Ok, now I'm confused. I want to track Google adwords results. Which contribution do I need to install?

 

Ad tracker or the affiliate tracker?

 

Thanks for any info

[wizardsandwars]

Chris, again, please read the entire thread, espcially the very first post.

 

I'm you'll you'd understand if you started from the beginning.

[wizardsandwars]

I'm *sure* you'd

[cgchris99]

I am trying to load Ad Tracker on my test server.

It is picking up the Referring page url but it will not pickup the Ref

 

This is part of the code loaded by ad tracker

//user_ad_tracker modification

if ($ad) {

$advertiser = $_GET["ad"];

tep_session_register('advertiser');

}

 

I changed the "ad" to "ref"

 

But what I don't understand is how it is checking if ($ad) I see no reference to this anywhere.

 

I put a link on one of my sites.

http://www.mydomain.com/default.php?ref=123

 

So I would expect it to pickup the 123. It gets the referring page name correctly which is http://www.mydomain.com/links.html

 

Any one have any ideas?

 

Thanks

[cgchris99]

I figured it out. Had to change this line

 

if ($ad)

 

to

 

if ($ref)

[wizardsandwars]

Correct, which was exactly what was posted earlier in this thread.

[wizardsandwars]

Hmmn, well, after re-reading the thread myself, it appears that it was not explicitly defined that way.

 

My apologies.

[cgchris99]

No problem. I didnt' realize in PHP if the command line had

www.mydomain.com/default.php?bugsbunny=123

 

You could just do if ($bugsbunny==123){}

 

I have programmed for years but know little about PHP. If I could just get up to speed on PHP I could be dangerous and produce some contributions.

[cgchris99]

Ad tracker doesn't seem to be working perfectly. I have tested creating accounts from my google ads but it doesn't always show the Ad in the customer file.

 

So I put in some code in the default.php, create_account.php & default.php

 

Right under <body

I put <?php print "<!-- $advertiser -->"; ?>

 

Now when I get the link to my page, I view the source and can see my "Advertisement code" that I placed.

 

However, when I go to create_account the $advertiser shows a blank.

 

I thought tep_session_register('advertiser'); which is in application top, causes the $advertiser to stay available or global to all php files?

 

Thanks for any advice