Control Panel User Manual
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Advanced Click Tracking
Action Tracking
Typical Usage
Actions are meant to represent leads or sales that are generated some period of time after a visitor
clicks on an advertisement. Tracking actions is actually very simple to do. Just use the code wizard
to generate an action code for an advertiser in HTML format and then have your advertiser include that
HTML code in the web pages that you want to generate the actions. Typically, the advertiser will place
the HTML code on their contact form and order form completion or thank you pages.
Note
Selecting the advertiser when generating an action code is generally the best thing to do. The ad
server is able to figure out which ad the visitor clicked on and credit the action to the correct
campaign, media, publisher, and zone. If, however, you have a special case where you only want to
track actions from a single campaign or media on a certain page (implying you are tracking actions
for many other campaigns from this advertiser), it is also possible to generate action code that
will only track actions for a specific campaign or media and not any others.
Warning
The ad server must be able to track clicks on your advertisement for it to be able to track actions.
Clicks cannot be automatically tracked with many rich media creatives and third party ad codes. With
some modification, however, it is usually possible to track clicks though. See the chapters on
Advanced Click Tracking and
Third Party Click Tracking for more information.
Advanced Usage
How can you track actions if you are serving an advertisement for an advertiser that's being served
by a third party ad server? The answer is sadly that you cannot most of the time because not many
third party ad servers support third party action tracking. However, for the few that do, you are
in luck because the ad server does support it!
Let's assume that you have received some code from your advertiser that looks like the following:
<SCRIPT language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.writeln('<SCR'+'IPT language=JavaScript type=text/javascript src="http://www.notreal.com/ads/campaign?id=123456&click=CLICK_URL_HERE&action=ACTION_URL_HERE">');
document.writeln('</SC'+'RIPT>');
//-->
</SCRIPT>
What you need to do is replace CLICK_URL_HERE and ACTION_URL_HERE with
the URLs that the ad server uses to track clicks and actions. This is actually very simple to do
because the ad server has %%CLICKTAG%% and %%ACTIONTAG%% macros designed
specifically for this purpose. So, go ahead and replace those placeholders with those macros and
you will end up with the following:
<SCRIPT language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.writeln('<SCR'+'IPT language=JavaScript type=text/javascript src="http://www.notreal.com/ads/campaign?id=123456&click=%%CLICKTAG%%&action=%%ACTIONTAG%%">');
document.writeln('</SC'+'RIPT>');
//-->
</SCRIPT>
Note
Some third parties may require you to supply them with unencoded or unescaped click and action
tracking URLs. If that is the case, simply use %%CLICKLINK%% and
%%ACTIONLINK%% instead. Those macros are designed to produce the same tracking URLs with
the exception that they will not be URL encoded.
Note
Some third parties may require you to supply them with click and action tracking URLs that are encoded
or escaped multiple times. If that is the case, simply use %%CLICKTAG2%% through
%%CLICKTAG5%% or %%ACTIONTAG2%% through %%ACTIONTAG5%% instead.
Those macros are designed to produce the same tracking URLs with the exception that they will be URL
encoded as many times as the number within them specifies.
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