Post-click activity tracking
Brand Central provides the option to track performance based on click-throughs and view-throughs. This option is very useful when more than one objective with a campaign is to be monitored, e.g. for first time users brand awareness and for more loyal users brand interaction such as purchasing a product (or many) or subscribing to an advertiser’s service.
Click-throughs are measured as straight clicks based on user-interaction by clicking on an advertising banner. View-throughs are slightliy different and basically measure how many users have seen an ad and without immedately clicking have then or later visited the campaign target website medium and possibly interacted witht the same.
Within Brand Central, post-click activites can be setup through the media planning module:
- Login to Brand Central
- Navigate to Media Planning Module
- Select an existing campaign that you would like to setup post-click activity tracking for
- Press “List post-click activities” button
The post-click activity listing appears on the screen and caters for four options:
- Create new post-click activity
- Edit an existing post-click activity
- Delete an existing post-click activity
- Download post-click activity tags as Excel document
Every post-click activity (new or edit button) has a description which is being used as reference for all post-click activity reports. The URL refers to the target website URL which should be different for every post-click activity as they can only be tracked based on unique website URLs. The parameters can be used for additional tracking such as e-Commerce shopping value or other parameters that are not the focus of this article.
The Download button provides an Excel sheet with all post-click activity tags listed. The tags need to be inserted into the Content Management System or code of the client website. Please cater for time to allow that customization through the IT department of the client.
Post-click activity tags
The syntax of post-click activity tags for the website is as follows:
<script src="http://mybrandcentral.com/activities/?id=123456" language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"></script>
The above Javascript code has the post-click activity ID coded as parameter and should not be modified. Anti-caching can be applied like used in publisher ad tags.
The ad tag should be added at the end of the website in order to avoid any discrepancy in case the page is not fully loaded.
For Flash micro sites or other Flash based websites, the post-click activity tracking code can be called form within Flash Actionscript and needs to be slightly modified:
activityID = 1020;
cacheburst = Math.round(Math.random() * (9999999999 - 1000000000)) + 1000000000;
createEmptyMovieClip("bcPostClickActivity", 9098);
bcPostClickActivity._x = -100;
url = "http://mybrandcentral.com/activities/?id="+activityID"&cacheburst="+cacheburst;
bcOutOfBrowser.loadMovie(url);
Please note that advanced knowledge of Flash Actionscript is required.
Exceptions
Post-click activity tracking and reporting is achieved by using cookies on user’s machines that require user permission in order to record this user interaction based data. Cookies can be disabled or frequently deleted which may create certain discrepancy - as it is out of control of Brand Central system and the advertiser.
Please note that the domain for ad-serving, click-throughs and post-click activities needs to be from the same domain, e.g. “https://mybrandcentral.com” or “http://mybrandcentral.com” as cookies cannot be read accross multiple domains (in most cases). Some browsers do allow for 3rd- party cookies accross multiple domains, but that is never a 100% secure method.
In addition, if the target site is hosted on a secure server, e.g. https or even http password protected such as an intranet or extranet, cookies may not be allowed either from 3rd parties such as Brand Central. It is always advisible to properly test the campaign and post-click activites and if necessary, to consult the Brand Central support team. As a rule of thumb, https sites can be tracked by changing the domain name to “mybrandcentral.com” within the ad-serving, click-through and post-click activity tag.
Reporting
Post-click activities can be tracked via Brand Central’s reporting module which is available from the main navigation. Reports are available on campaign level (total number ofpost-click activity conversion calls, or via drill down through campaign, flight and post-click activitiy reports.
Graphs and Excel downloads are available as well for unlimited number of post-click activities.
