Today we are letting you know about a new feature to help you better monitor traffic coming from your adCenter campaigns. Read this post to learn about finding duplicate clicks in your web server logs.
When analyzing click counts from your web server logs, the click counts may differ from the count shown in the adCenter user interface and reports. Why might this be occurring? It turns out that routine activities, such as a web-visitor refreshing on your landing page, may be causing your web traffic to appear as if multiple visitors came to your site. This can lead to click inflation in your web server logs. By taking advantage of adCenter ClickIDs, you can reduce these potentially erroneous clicks and help ensure that your reporting systems are only tracking true counts of referrals and match up with adCenter.
How to switch on ClickIDs
- Open up your adgroup
- Select your ad
- Add msclkid={msclkid} to your adCenter destination URL
- If your destination URL is www.dataminingcasestudies.com, then add as follows www.dataminingcasestudies.com/?msclkid={msclkid}.
- If your URL is www.dataminingcasestudies.com/?param1=1 then add as follows www.dataminingcasestudies.com/?param1=1&msclkid={msclkid}
- Please note that some web servers are not configured to accept query parameters, and when making any change there's always a risk of introducing a typo or other error, so we recommend double checking that the above URL works after you've completed your changes.
The final edited URL will look something like the figure below.
How ClickIDs can help you improve your tracking
Whenever a user clicks on your ad, adCenter will then replace the {msclkid} that you embedded with an internally generated ClickID. Your webserver then receives the incoming request plus ClickID and logs both. Below is an example of what you might see in your web server logs.
131.107.0.73 - - [07/Aug/2008:04:10:38 -0400] "GET /?msclkid=cdd4afcccb1c9a4cad9544dd7e5006d5 HTTP/1.0" 200 4674 "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=data+mining+case+studies&form=QBRE" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; MS-RTC LM 8)"
You can now use the ClickID to eliminate duplicate calls. For example if you see a series of records in your weblog such as:
131.107.0.73 - - [07/Aug/2008:04:10:38 -0400] "GET /?msclkid=cdd4afcccb1c9a4cad9544dd7e5006d5 HTTP/1.0" 200 4674 "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=data+mining+case+studies&form=QBRE" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; MS-RTC LM 8)"
131.107.0.73 - - [07/Aug/2008:04:11:38 -0400] "GET /?msclkid=cdd4afcccb1c9a4cad9544dd7e5006d5 HTTP/1.0" 200 4674 "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=data+mining+case+studies&form=QBRE" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; MS-RTC LM 8)"
131.107.0.73 - - [07/Aug/2008:04:12:38 -0400] "GET /?msclkid=abc4accccd1c9aecad1544ed7e4111e1 HTTP/1.0" 200 4674 "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=data+mining+case+studies&form=QBRE" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; MS-RTC LM 8)"
Then you will be able to recognize that the first two are duplicate referrals (same user who has refreshed their page), and the third is a separate unique click, so only 2 referrals from adCenter instead of 3.
Reconciliation Problems Be Gone! (Well. Almost!)
Neither adCenter nor web analytics companies can eliminate duplicate calls and repeated refreshes from users. However ClickIDs can help to let you know what traffic was uniquely referred from adCenter. This functionality is optional and we hope that it will provide you with more accurate information on click referrals coming from adCenter.