How do I monitor clicks on ads from my site? - web-services

I would like to put some ads on my site.
All I have is jpegs of the ads. I would like to know when a user clicked my ads, and which.
I figure I put a heading for the links address:
http://cocacola.com
|
--> http://someadservice.com?goto=http://cocacola.com&senderID=1234
Does that makes sense?
What services are there (preferably free) that I can use for that and how do they work?

To reliably count a click, you would send the user to your own server and then redirect him to the final ad destination.
The you can count all the requests on your server.
All advertising platforms offer a similar kind of tracking, since they usually charge by click (called CPC).

Related

Navigate to the timeline (to the card with bundleId) from within an application

I have a Glass application that is activated by a voice command. The user requests a product and the request is then passed on to a node.js server, which handles the bulk logic of my application. When the node server is done, it builds some HTML templates that it passes on to the Mirror API, which then puts those cards into the timeline of the Glass app.
Now the problem I have is this:
When a user requests something from within the application, he just stays within that application but the cards from the Mirror API are put onto the timeline.
Is it possible to navigate the user from within the application to the timeline item that has just been inserted?
As I build the Mirror API timeline item, I know ahead of time what the bundleId will be on the timeline, so can I use that somehow to navigate to that item on the timeline?
I've had a look here on Stackoverflow, the Glass forums and the official documentation and couldn't see anything that would help.. Anybody here have any ideas?
Currently the only way for forcing a specific card to show in the timeline is by using a LiveCard (https://developers.google.com/glass/develop/gdk/reference/com/google/android/glass/timeline/LiveCard). Live cards will automatically be given focus when published and you can force the timeline to give your card focus after publishing by calling LiveCard.navigate().
So unfortunately unless you want to change some of the fundamentals of your app, this isn't going to be much help.
Though from the sounds of it, you may be able to use a LiveCard to show what is returned from your server. If you want to perform inserts via the mirror API, this could still be done in addition.

How to track client payment information of a visitor redirected from my website

I want to implement a system similar to affilite tracking systems like Skimlinks, Viglink, etc. I searched their customer tracking systems. Found some information about tracking systems. I have also searched Analytics systems like Google Analytics, Piwik, OWA. There is a point I need to be guided.
When a user visits my website, clicks a product link of a shopping website like ebay, amazon, etc. I need to track the payment information of my user at the shopping website.
I achieved tracking user activity, clicks, etc on my web site with using Analytics's tracking methods (JS tracking). But I cannot find a way how Skimlinks or Viglink tracks user activity(succesful payment of users) in the shopping website which user redirected.
(Tracking user activity in the shopping website without using a service from shopping website, without Instant Payment Notification service of PayPay or something else)
I noticed Viglink and Skimlinks redirects user to their server before shopping and adds some additional information (like cookies, URL parameters etc)
Here is an example link to affiliate link of Skimlinks
website : http://www.capoeira-izmir.com/capoeira-kiyafetleri/
link : Street Abada
http://go.redirectingat.com/?id=25227X845172&site=capoeira-izmir.com&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2FHELANCA-POLYAMID-CAPOEIRA-PANTS-ABADA-YOGA-FREE-BONFIM-%2F280678232152%3Fpt%3DUS_CSA_MC_Pants%26hash%3Ditem4159b9f058%23ht_2891wt_1163&xguid=94275a6f74c7ce02bf4739e364d8831c&xcreo=0&sref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.capoeira-izmir.com%2Fcapoeira-kiyafetleri%2F
It redirects user to go.redirectingat.com first, then a redirection is done to ebay.com/...
I also noticed that it adds an attribute to the url of ebay product link : afsrc=1
I guess it is "affiliate source = 1 " or something like that.
Any guidance or documents about this will be great for me.
Thanks in advance!!
I think your question is more about how online advertising works rather than technical.
This is a two parts answer.
1. How a conversion tracking works:
In any advertising platform that tracks conversions (any user action that happens in the advertiser property like, in example, a sale) you need to make a request to the advertising platform to notify this.
This is usually done by placing a "Tracking pixel" in the confirmation page the users see after performing the action, commonly known as the "Thank you page".
So the process goes like:
User goes to a website and sees an ad
User clicks the ad
The user's browser goes to the advertising platform (Adwords, Rightmedia, Appnexus, etc) and a cookie is placed in her browser. In this cookie there's a click ID, containing all the relevant information (website that originated the click, time, IP, campaign, etc) and it is redirected to the advertiser's website
The user lands in the advertiser website and "converts" (buys)
The user is redirected to the Thank you page where a "Tracking pixel" is placed, this makes a request to the advertising platform, which reads the cookies in the user's browser and if there's a match, logs the conversion.
Note: The previous example is a Client Side conversion. The same logic could be done in a Server Side request by the advertiser saving the "click id" in step 4 and sending it to the advertising platform in step 5. This is useful when the conversion occurs offline.
For more information: Adwords Conversion tracking: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722054?hl=en
2. How I assume VigLink works
I noticed that many of the products VigLink tracks are from ClickBank, since this is the one I'm more used to, I will write the answer using this example.
You first need to be aware that VigLink is an "affiliate" of Clickbank. As such, it has a report of every sale made by users they referred. They, as affiliates, also have the chance to pass extra information in each click as a TID parameter. This TID sent as a URL parameter in the click will be shown in the sales report.
When a user clicks on a link to a clickbank product using VigLink. VigLink attaches their affiliate link to this same product and a unique TID. I assume this TID matches an ID in their database containing the information of the VigLink website who referred the click.
If the user buys the product, VigLink will see in their ClickBank report (I assume via the ClickBank API) the product bought and the TID, and so on they will know in which website the sale was originated.
Short answer: VigLink is not tracking user actions in the advertiser's website. They are just matching click IDs between their click tracker and the advertiser's reports.

Help with design a facebook integration for my website.. App or Page?

I´m building a website to post my own videos using JW Player running my own ads as overlay.
www.planetsnowmobile.com
All my videos will be
Instead of register my own users, having my own forum etc etc I want to use facebook to interact with my visitors:
Individual discussions/comments on individual films instead of my own comment/forum-function
facebook-like-button for individual films (so induvidual like buttons for individual films)
Share induvidual films
Grab location from every unique visitor
Where do I start?
Do I need to create an application or should I use a Facebook "page"?
Maybe both?
I see that i can add an application to a "page" but what does that really do? How do I use that?
What would be the best way for me to do this?
I already have a Facebook "page" for my website and I just created an App as well.
Which one should I use?
Do I need both?
What is the difference?
I know that I can create a like button for a website address on http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
But can I monitor that like button from example an application if I can connect them somehow?
Is that something I want to do?
My Facebook-page already have a user-base where my Facebook-application does not.. is my best option to delete my "page" and start all over with my "application"?
App is their encompassing term for any application that uses their API, this could be on Facebook or on your own personal website - these require an API key to make authenticated calls for users. Pages are FB's own in-Facebook content that users have created, like page for a business located at facebook.com/mybusiness. It sounds like you already have a website and want to add Facebook functionality to it, so you don't want to make another Page. You may not even need to create an App. Things like comment boxes and like buttons can be dropped in as stand-alone copy-and-paste widgets. You can track the like button by enabling FB insights for your website.
So like you noticed you can add a like button to your page using the social plugin from http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ - similar to the like button you can add comment boxes with the plugin at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/
You can track the results from these plugins by adding your website to Facebook's analytics (Insights) at http://www.facebook.com/insights/
Most of these things are powered by the opengraph metadata in the headers of your website's pages. You can read up on what tags FB uses here http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/
Everything at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/ can be used without an application or page ID, and is very good about being responsive to the page they are hosted on: you can add a like button to your video view template without a defined URL in the like button's parameters, and it will automatically direct any likes to the url of the currently viewed video.
You could also direct a like button to point to your existing FB Page, in which case any likes collected from it would be added to the Page's total. Most companies that have a home-page like button do this, so their likes all accumulate to a single total for their business.
Hope that helps.

Pulling Facebook photos onto an external website

I'm doing a job for Company A. I've just built their website in Django but now they want to add a social photo management aspect to the site (in that other people can upload).
The only way I know of doing this (having done it before) is through Flickr. You can set up a group and have it so anybody can add photos to it. And pull out the latest with RSS. But let's be honest, Facebook is far more popular and my client wants this feature heavily used by his clientèle.
They have a Facebook page and the power to open it up so anybody can add their photos to it... But how can I pull those photos back to the website?
Facebook's query language can do this (like the RSS sends data to you from Flickr) for users of FB pages, and there are some Javascripts for making them viewable and interactive on external web pages.
For example:
http://www.codeofaninja.com/2011/06/display-facebook-photos-to-your-website.html
http://www.alexanderinteractive.com/blog/2012/03/display-facebook-photos-on-your-website-with-galleria/
Good luck!
Terry
I'm not sure if this will help, but I recall that the Flock Web Browser had the capability of loading a stream of new videos/photos on the top of the brower's media stream bar - perhaps you can sneak a peek into the inner workings it uses to accomplish this task.
I know that you can start reading the RSS feed of a Facebook Page itself now, perhaps just a little parsing is all you need: http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-pages-rss-2010-01

Facebook integration... Where to start?

I recently put a django project of mine into its beta stages and would really like to integrate more with social media, particularly facebook.
Now there are so many facebook integrations out there... I don't know where to start but, I'll tell you what I am after.
My sites publishes content with photos and also user related data (which site doesn't)
on each individual page I already have a facebook like button that basically has the absolute url of that page
so for instance:
http://my-site.com/url-1
http://my-site.com/url-345345
http://my-site.com/url-456456456
When a user likes this particular url I would like them to become a Fan on my facebook site/page as well.
I also added the FB opengraph tool which is a bit more informative once a user likes it. But it still does not publish any statistics to my page.
Can someone give me a bit of an understanding on what the best option is for this type of integration?
As a security option for the user, Facebook has never allowed third party access to "become a fan."
If you want to record locally when someone presses the "Like" button, you'll have to implement it locally (copy the presentation, and query Facebook yourself), so you can intercept the event. I've done that; it's not too hard.
I suggest you review the Connect Terms of Service to see what it is you're allowed to do: http://developers.facebook.com/policy/