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Arbitrage and event tracking (13)

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Hey guys
anyone here doing arbitrage and knows how to track ad clicks (from revcontent, content.ad) on google analytics .Ideally I'd like to pull reports on revenue generated by publishers from networks I am buying traffic from. I know I need to set up event tracking on google analytics and I after reading a few articles I am still not a 100% sure how to go about it. If anyone done it would be nice if you could share.If Ill figure it out sooner , ill post it of course (:

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This post goes quite in depth

http://www.nativeadbuzz.com/blog/blo...-your-profits/

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Actually read that already this week, but there is no answer to it there

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Hey orisin1,

not exactly sure what you want to do, based on your post, so here's how I understood it:

"How can I track in Google Analytics both clicks and revenue by publishers"?

Google Analytics by default will track sessions, not clicks, so you will typically have a deviation between clicks reported in the ad interface and Google Analytics visits. Mainly three reasons. Clicks don't go through (i.e. timeout in the redirect chain), GA code not firing on the landing page (i.e. privacy plugins, JS disabled, filter, user bounces too quickly); user clicks several times and ad network is not deduplicating clicks properly (one session in GA, two clicks).

What you need to do to be able to optimize on publisher or placement, is you need to parse in the targeting data from the content network dynamically - either in the standard utm parameters of GA or in a custom dimension. Revcontent offers these for example:
Medium: <adv_targets>
Term: <content_id>
Content: <widget_id>
here's the documentation to use them with GA http://faq.revcontent.com/support/so...ogle-analytics

If you are still interested to track clicks within Google Analytics, you can upload them as a custom metric into GA and then calculate the GA revenue per click by that. https://support.google.com/analytics.../3191589?hl=en

You can also use that feature to import the cost data and calculate ROI in GA.

Again, not sure if that answers the question, maybe I've misread what you're trying to do here.

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I am not talking about direct performance campaign tracking I am talking about pure arbitrage campaign tracking. I know how to track all the metrics using GA what I am having trouble with is matching publishers and the number of clicks I received from visits of those publishers on ads from native networks that are placed on my web propreties. So for example I have a viral site to which I drive traffic from outbrain and that is populated with ads from revcontent, I need to know which outbrain publishers are bringing the most clicks/revenue

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Ah, got it.

The way to track these kind of scenarios in Google Analytics properly is not events, but: Ecommerce Tracking. You need to consider every clickout a purchase. Reason why:
1) Event values are integers in Google Analytics, not decimals, so they are not useful to track revenue
2) Tracking a clickout as a goal with a goal value underestimates real revenue, as a use can only convert once in Google Analytics per session; but potentiall a user has more than one clickout per session.

What to watch out for
1) Properly tag the incoming traffic with dynamic publisher parameters (as pointed out above in the first posts) to make sure that the sessions are attributed to the right publisher (in your example: Outbrain publisher)
2) Make sure that you implement the ecommerce tracking in a way that it is definitely sent to Google Analytics, before the user leaves the site; i.e. open target URL in a new tab if possible, or attempt to delay the redirect until the ecom tracking is successfully sent to the GA server (200 response)). Traditional price comparison arbitrage models have a "redirect page" in between that makes sure that the tracking scripts are fired successfully, but I guess that's not an option here.
3) Populate the ecommerce tracking parameters as you wish, i.e. with whatever information you can understand from the clickout (article ID,
creative ID, whatever is visible in the DOM), so that you can slice and dice your success data.
4) Not sure how stable the CPC is in your arbitrage model. Typically you don't have the exact number during the runtime, so you need to put a guesstimate in.

Then you can do proper breakdown reports by channel, publisher, etc and see who brought in the most revenue based on which ad clickouts.

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Bonus: You can use Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking to get a better understanding of purchase behaviour (=> clickout behavior).

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Thank you for the much detailed response, I am still struggling with it to be honest, but ill figure it out eventually (:

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Not gonna lie, I am super confused about it (:
If you done this before and can help me on Skype, I would greatly appreciate it

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this is not a five minute thing; as pointed out above you need to setup campaigns properly, do an enhanced ecommerce code integration with Google Analytics, potentially delay clickout until the code is fired.

You can run this through our consulting unit at Finc3, but we don't take on projects <5k EUR in revenue, so you might be better off just looking for a freelance GA consultant who has enhanced ecommerce experience and solid JS skills.

Learning it yourself step-by-step: Review the developer documentation on enhanced ecommerce first (https://developers.google.com/analyt...nced-ecommerce), because this is how you need to track your clickouts - as purchases. Secondly review how to dynamically pass in publisher URLs and how to use a tag management system to pass in any additionally required/wanted variables into the ecommerce purchase.

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Totally understand, and again thank you for the detailed response

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Hi orisin1, have you managed to fix this issue? I'm stuck at the same problem as you. Read a ton of articles but still could not figure this part of the tracking.

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No bud sorry, never figured it out

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