Re: Tracking Rich Media Banner Advertising

From: Allen Wyke <allen_wyke_at_engage.com>
Date: Mon 30 Oct 2000 15:36:32 -0500

GLENN SMITH <gsmith_at_digitalbridge.com> WROTE:
> I've been told that Rich Media banners cannot be
> tracked from a click through standpoint, but can be
> tracked by impressions. Is that true, and does anyone
> on this list know of an Ad Serving service that does
> track rich media impressions and click throughs?

Engage AdManager can do this pretty easily, as long as
the ad, no matter what kind it is, is designed to
accept a click from the AdManager system. But this is
true no matter what kind of system you are using - ad
serving or not.

The big issue with any rich media ad is that the ad
serving the initial redirect/ad fragment/ad call (will
call this AdManager1) to the third party (AdManager2)
has NO idea what the click is. So, the requirements on
AdManager2 is that it must be able to have a click
passed to it from AdManager1.

Now, some 3rd party ad servers have something like
click= to take that click, which they then "ping"
AdManager1. This is no good since it limits what
AdManager1 can track. For instance, if AdManager2 does
not pass the entire HTTP header from the browser when a
click occurs, then AdManager1 is unable to log items
such as browser, operating system, or maybe domain
stats on the clicks. Even if AdManager2 does pass the
entire header, AdManager1 can forget being able to
track anything that has to do with cookie. Technically
you could get around this by having AdManager1 pass the
cookie value on the click= part, but there is no way
you want to do that either - privacy issues of passing
your cookies to another party is not a good thing.

The correct way, although it does increase the number
of real redirects (ie: HTTP 302 messages), is for
AdManager2, when a click is received, to log the click
and redirect the user to the click= value that it was
originally passed by AdManager1. In addition,
AdManager2 MUST also pass the URL the browser should
ultimately go to - the click URL that is. This allows
AdManager1 to track the click and then take the URL it
was passed and send the user on their way to the
correct location.

This is definitely a tricky situation, but the beauty
is that it works for all rich media ads (as long as it
is not a <form> using method="post", but no one can do
that one) assuming the proper requirements are met.
This are:

1. AdManager2 must be able to take a click URL from
AdManager1 .

2. The rich media ad must be able to invoke a click
created by the ad server - in other words, it can not
be hard coded into the code for things like Java ads or
Flash ads. This is true even if you are not redirecting
to a 3rd party though, but did want to mention.

3. AdManager1 must be able to take the real/final click
URL from the AdManager2 redirect, log the click, and
pass the user on to the URL it was passed.

And that is it!





Received on Mon Oct 30 2000 - 14:36:32 CST