A Web of Relationships: – Accurate Tracking and Reporting the Key to profitable long-term relationships
By Gregory Stoltz
Direct Response Technologies, Inc.
Today’s
Internet really is a web – a web of interconnected web sites
and a tangle of relationships. When those relationships are
monetary tracking, the click patterns and actions of web
users is vital to the maintenance of those relationships.
This tracking needs to be accurate and extremely unobtrusive
to both the web user and those paying for the traffic.
Balancing the needs for being both unobtrusive and accurate
is a challenge faced by Internet marketers every day and a
struggle being fought by the various technology providers in
very similar ways. This article will explain those methods
and provide the benefits and drawbacks of the various
approaches.
Methods of Tracking
The
challenge facing Internet marketers and supporting
technology providers is to use methods that impact the user
as little as possible and yet provide a great deal of
accuracy in reporting the results of the relationships.
Challenges
- Need for
loose integration to support easy implementation
- Privacy
concerns and the blocking of cookies
Click Tracking Methods
There are
two primary methods of tracking a click on an advertisement
– either the web user is redirected through a tracking
system that records the click or the web user is sent to a
web page that contains JavaScript that makes an external
call to a tracking system to record the click.
- Redirects
- JavaScript
embedded within a landing page
- Pixels
embedded within a landing page
The
positive aspect of redirects is there is no requirement on
the advertiser’s part to modify the contents of their
landing page. Although the changes required are minimal,
this requirement can pose a serious headache for very large
sites with numerous landing pages. This is particularly
true if the traffic that is being tracked originates from a
PPC (pay per click) search engine and the advertiser is
using hundreds or even thousands of keywords that land at
different places. The benefit of using JavaScript is the
elimination of the redirect that, depending upon the web
user’s Internet connection and the reliability of the
tracking system, could result in the user abandoning the
click and therefore never actually landing at the desired
location.
Within the
Direct Response Technologies family of product offerings,
both methods are used. Within the system designed primarily
to support the tracking of affiliate relationships which are
typically compensated on a CPA (cost per action) basis, the
primary method is the use of redirects. Within the system
used for tracking the results of PPC (pay per click) search
engines, the JavaScript method is used. This is to ensure
the highest degree of accuracy between the results reported
by the search engines and the results reported and acted
upon within the keyword management system.
Action Tracking – Pixels, an industry
standard
Pixel
tracking has been a standard method of loose integration
within the lead generation business for several years. The
DirectLeads™ network pioneered this method when it began
tracking leads driven by affiliated partners in 1997. The
benefit of this method of tracking a lead is that the
requirements placed on the advertiser are minimal –
advertisers simply place an image tag representing a 1x1
pixel on the page displayed immediately after the action
that needs to be tracked.
The process
is really quite simple. A web user clicks a link that
references an advertisement. The user is then sent to the
web site of the tracking system; the tracking system places
a cookie on the web user’s computer, records the click and
then immediately redirects the web user to the advertiser’s
web site. In the case of using JavaScript in place of a
redirect, the web user is sent directly to the advertisers
landing page, where JavaScript embedded within that page
places a cookie and makes an external call to the tracking
system to record the click. The web user then completes a
lead form and is taken to a thank you page. Within this
thank you page, the tracking pixel is embedded. This pixel
is really a call to a script running on the tracking
system. This script requests the cookie from the web user’s
computer and credits the proper affiliate with the lead and
then returns a 1x1 image.
The
benefits of using cookies to track these interactions is
that the cookie lifetime can be set to extend the period of
time during which the affiliate will be provided with credit
for the action. This time typically varies from a day to a
week to, in the case of the DirectLeads network, an entire
month. This means that once an affiliate is given credit
for the click, if the person returns to the advertiser’s web
site and completes the process any time during the lifetime
of the cookie, the affiliate will be credited with the lead.
The
tracking of leads typically involves the placing of a static
pixel. In the case of the DirectTrack™ system this pixel
typically looks like this:
<IMG
SRC=http://secure.directtrack.com/lead/demo/1>
What
appears to be a normal image source representing a file
named “1” in the /lead/demo directory of the web server is
in actuality a call to a piece of software contained within
the tracking system, this software is passed two parameters
– “demo” representing to which client the lead will be
tracked and “1” representing the advertising campaign.
In the case
of an advertiser wishing to compensate their affiliated
partners based upon the amount of a given sale, a static
pixel does not provide the tracking system with enough
information. For DirectTrack™ this requires the merchant
to dynamically generate the tracking pixel within their
thank you page to include additional information, for
example:
<IMG SRC="https://secure.directtrack.com/sale/demo/2/10.00/9999">
In this
case the number 10.00 represents to value of the sale upon
which the partner will be compensated and the 9999 is a
unique identifier for the transaction. Typically this will
be the order number, and by passing it into the tracking
system the advertiser can very easily back out any sales
that end up being returned or otherwise voided.
Alternative methods to boost accuracy
With the
growing privacy concerns of Internet users and privacy
control features included with modern web browsers, the
number of users either deleting their cookies or blocking
their placement has grown and will continue to do so. This
results in discrepancies between the actual sales or leads
generated by an advertiser and the results recorded within
an external tracking system. Independent tests of the
DirectTrack™ pixel tracking method report an accuracy range
of between 93% and 97%. To improve these results to
approach 100% accuracy requires tighter integration from
what can be achieved with cookies. DirectTrack™ supports
a number of alternative methods that can be employed. These
methods include:
- Combining
the lead tracking process with the actual capture of the
lead
- A
Transactional API based upon SOAP(simple object access
protocol)
- The
passing of additional parameters to the landing page, these
parameters can then be either imported into the system or
passed back to the system via a dynamically generated pixel
By
combining the lead tracking and capture process, partners
can be assured that they will be properly credited with
every lead they have delivered. There is simply no margin
for error and no reliance upon cookies to attribute the
transaction to the proper partner. DirectTrack™ supports
this method. The lead capture forms can be customized to
meet the needs of the advertiser and edit checks easily put
into place to filter out bad information during the capture
process.
Making use
of a transactional API provides for much tighter integration
with an advertisers sales or lead capture system. The
advertiser’s system makes a programmatic call to the
tracking system; the tracking system records the transaction
and returns an acknowledgment back to the advertiser’s
system. This increases the accuracy of the tracking over a
simple pixel which may or may not have been loaded properly
because of the variables involved in making a simple HTTP
call off the Internet.
Another
method of increasing the reliability of the tracking process
while not relying on the presence of cookies is the passing
of additional information via the pixel. For example,
within the DirectTrack™ system, the advertiser can capture a
unique ID which can be passed via the query string and then
pass this unique ID back to DirectTrack™ within the pixel.
If this ID is passed, the system makes use of it instead of
requesting the same information from the user’s computer.
This ensures that the transaction will be properly credited
without relying on the user accepting cookies.
Accurate Tracking the Key to Successful
Partnerships
It’s hard
to argue with the fact that accurate tracking and reporting
of partner relationships is one of the keys to building
lasting, long-term and profitable relationships. When
choosing which methods to make use of it’s important for
advertisers to understand the pros and cons of the various
methods and to choose the one that best meets their needs
when it comes to both accuracy and implementation. The very
common pixel method provides the easiest implementation with
the drawback of only being able to provide 93% to 97%
accuracy, while more complex methods require additional
effort and expertise but can boost the accuracy of the
tracking much closer to 100%.
DirectTrack™
like some competing solutions provides advertisers with many
options, allowing them to make the choice based upon their
needs and not the limitations of the tracking solution.
By Gregory Stoltz
Direct Response Technologies, Inc.
