Visitor and Sales Tracking with DynAds Pro

Do you want to know the origin of your customers? Isn't it good to know the number of customers brought to you via each of your ad banners and campaigns, separately? Do you want to know which keywords that you are bidding on the pay per click search engines such as Google and Overture, bring you sales and which keywords are just waste of money? Do you want to track sales from repeat visitors such as someone returning to your site after 45 days of the first visit? Do you want to know to which pages your visitors are going after viewing a particular page? Do you want to know the source distribution of visitors coming to a particular page?

With DynAds Pro you can do all of these and more. The key features of DynAds Pro that allows you to track visitors, pages and sales are:

• Each Ad is labeled with a category and a type. Thus, you can obtain gross sum result of a category or a type in the reports.
• Ads can be grouped into campaigns. Each campaign can be configured to set a unique persistent visitor cookie upon a click or view (or both) of an ad of the campaign. You can assign the duration of the cookie, whether it is 1 day or 365 days. Whenever someone activates one of the ads (a view or click) of the campaign, a cookie is placed to his/her browser. If a cookie was already placed by DynAds Pro before by any of the campaigns, then the cookie is renewed.
• DynAds Pro allows you to place a small tracking code on your website pages. Thus, you can track the page views, links, and regular advertising with the same software.
• DynAds Pro saves the visitor cookie and the visitor IP address along with every visitor action in report tables.
• Log reports of DynAds Pro reporting engine lets you view and sort entries in the reports with respect to the visitor id (cookie) and IP. Thus you can inspect the tracks of a visitor manually.
• DynAds Pro has a very powerful visitor reporting engine. You can select the FROM campaigns and TO campaigns. Then DynAds Pro generates a table showing how many of visitors are going to each TO campaign from each FROM campaign. This is the vital information. For example, If the TO campaign is the tracking code on the sales confirmation page, and FROM campaigns are the PPC ads, then you can easily obtain which of the PPC keywords are bringing more sales.

Step by Step Example

Consider that you have a small (for the sake of the example) e-commerce web site, consisting of 15 pages, and selling number of products. Lets say you have 50 keywords that you are bidding on Overture, and 35 keywords on Google. Lets further assume that you are doing banner advertising on 5 different websites.

Now, you want to know which of the advertising method is bringing more sales. You want to know if Google is better than Overture for the same keyword! In addition, you want to know which keyword or banner ad results in more sales. Plus, you want to know which of your pages are more effective in generating sales. Moreover, you want to understand the visitor behavior once it comes to a page. Is he/she leaving the site at that page? Or which page do they prefer to go from a particular page?

Setting up for pay per click ads

All PPC search engines allows you to specify a different destination (tracking) URL for each keyword you are bidding. We will use this fact to track the clicks of the ads on PPC search engines.

Then you will create an ad for every keyword on each search engine. That is, you will create 50 ads for overture and 35 ads for Google. If you think that, your keywords can be categorized, then you can define categories and then assign the ad for the keyword to be under that category.

Login to the admin panel. Enter to the Ads menu. If you want to define categories, then enter to Categories submenu. Click New and enter the name and description of the category and then press Save to save the category info. Repeat for all of your categories. When you finished defining categories, enter to Ads submenu. Click New to define the ad for the first keyword. Select the account, category and type of the ad. Enter the name of the ad as SearchEngineName_KeywordX. That is, if the search engine is Overture and the keyword is xyz, then enter the name as Overture_xyz. Then, enter the destination URL of this keyword into the Redirection URL field of the ad. The destination URL is the URL of the page you want the visitor to go when he/she clicks your ad on the PPC search engine. Click Save to save the ad. Repeat the above procedure for all of your keywords for both Overture and Google. Note that, if you want the same keyword to go to the same page for all of the search engines, then you can define only one keyword ad without the SearchEngine prefix in the ad name.

After defining the ads for keywords, you should group them in campaigns for each search engine. Enter to the Campaigns menu and then click New to define a new campaign. Enter the SearchEngineName as the name of the campaign. That is for Overture, enter Overture, and for Google enter Google as the name of the campaign. Then, select Set Visitor Tracking Cookie on option for Clicks (since only click events will happen for these campaigns). Click Save to save the campaign and enter to the edit view. Then, scroll down the page to add the keyword ads to this campaign. In the Ads in the Campaign section, select the keyword ads of the corresponding search engine and Add them to the campaign. The weight and other parameters are not important. Repeat te procedure for the other search engine. At the end, you will have two campaigns named Overture and Google. Overture campaign will include 50 keyword ads and Google campaign will include 35 keyword ads.

DynAds Pro requires that campaigns be placed in a zone for tracking purposes. For our redirection purposes, the zone is not important. So it is satisfactory to create a default zone and place the campaigns in that zone. To create a zone, enter to Zones menu and click to New to define a new zone. Enter the name of the zone, and click to Save to save and go to edit view. In edit view, select and add the corresponding campaigns into the zone one by one. The weight and the order number are not important.

Now, you have completed the system setup for Overture and Google keywords. You should generate the tracking URL for each keyword and set it as the destination URL for your actual ad in the corresponding search engine. Enter to Code Generator menu and then to URL Redirection submenu. Select the keyword ad in the corresponding campaign in the list of ads displayed on the page. Then click to Get URL button to display the redirection URL in a text box. Your URL will be something like

http://YourDomain/InstallationPath/ad.pl?md=re&z=1&ca=5

As a summary, whenever someone clicks your ad for a particular keyword in the search engine, he/she will be redirected to the corresponding campaign/ad of DynAds Pro by the search engine. Then DynAds Pro will set/renew a tracking cookie in the visitors browser and save a click record for the corresponding keyword ad. Then, the visitor will be redirected to the original destination page on your site.

Setting up for banner ads on other sites

Since you are advertising on other sites, we can safely assume that ads are not served by DynAds Pro on your site. In general you upload your ad to the ad rotation program of the site you are advertising. Thus, you can only track the clicks to your banner ads.

Then, the procedure is very similar to the keyword ads. You should define an ad for each of your banners on every site, with the Redirection URL field of the ad containing the actual destination page URL of the banner ad. Then, create a campaign for each site you are advertising and place the corresponding redirection ads into the campaign. Since you are advertising on 5 websites, then you should have 5 campaigns containing the corresponding ads. Similar to PPC ads, obtain the tracking URL for each of your banners from the Code Generator menu and submit that URL as the banner destination URL to the site you are advertising on. As a result, every click to your banners will be tracked by DynAds Pro.

Setting up for tracking page views

With DynAds Pro you can place an SSI, Java Script or IMG tag code on your website pages to track the views of that page. In order to distinguish pages from the other, you create an empty ad for each page you want to track. Since you have 15 pages on your e-commerce site, you should create 15 ads with names representing the pages. You do not have to place any ad content or url into the ads. Just let them empty. Then create a campaign named 'Page Tracking', for example, and place the page ads into that campaign. If you like, enable visitor tracking on views on the campaign. Again add the campaign to a zone before obtaining a tracking code.

To obtain the page view tracking code enter to Code Generator menu and then to Remote Tracking submenu. Select Remote Counting for Predefined Zones/Campaigns/Ads option in the first drop down selection box. Then select Record as a View option. If your site users SSI to generate pages, select SSI code. Otherwise select 'Java Script' code. Then select the page ad in the table displayed below. Click the Generate Code button to get the tracking code in a text box. The code for Java Script will be something like

Copy and paste the code to the corresponding page of your site. Then, whenever someone views your page, DynAds Pro will be notified about the event.

Setting up for sales tracking

Sales tracking is nothing more than placing a page view tracing code on your sales confirmation page. Just create an ad for the sales confirmation page, place it into a campaign and place the campaign into a zone. Then obtain the tracking code as described in the previous section, and place it on your sales confirmation page.

Whenever someone orders some products, DynAds Pro will be notified about the event.

Obtaining Visitor Transition Table

After you have setup the tracking system and operate it for a while, it is time to check the results. You want to know the distribution of sales.

Enter to the Reports menu and then to the Visitor submenu in the admin panel. Admin panel will display visitor report preparation menu.

First, assume that you want to compare the keywords on Overture. Then select Overture campaign in the Campaigns drop down box of From Campaign(s) section. Then select Ads in the Show results for drop down box in the From Campaign(s) section.

In the To Campaign(s) section, select the Ad of the sales confirmation page in the Ads drop down box and select Ads in the Show results for drop down box.

Select the time range to analyze, and click Report button to obtain the visitor distribution to sales page from Overture ads.

A sample report is shown below which shows visitors from some Overture keywords to the Download page. In the report, you can see the total number of visitors, the number of visitors and percentage of visitors ended up at download page starting from a keyword, and the number of unmatched (going elsewhere) visitors.

The other reports are similar to the one above. Experiment with the settings on the Visitor report menu.