How Well Do You Know Your Traffic?
by Levi Stanley
Do you really know how much traffic you are sending to a site?
Did you know some of the affiliate programs might be counting a unique on a different time interval than 24-hour segments? Well, this brief section will help you start managing your traffic better, and also help you figure out why that $45. dollar a signup is so elusive for so many of you webmasters.
Many of the code segments you will be viewing throughout this article are mostly written in PERL, for a few reasons:
Most UNIX systems come with it pre-installed.
It's pretty fast analyzing flat files for the analysis of information.
Most people are already familiar with PERL syntax.
We also decided not to use a database in our examples, because most webmasters, aren't DBA, and felt that it would add more complexity to our discussion than is needed. However, we will provide a database version for those who request it, via the e-mail provided below.
How much traffic do you really have?
Knowing how many people view your ads, and how many people click your ads is very important in analyzing how much traffic you really have. Moreover, knowing this information will help you figure out which of your banners convert well, and which do not. Many affiliate programs have hundreds of great looking banners, but only a few that appeal to your traffic. Finding the right banners fast is imperative, as knowing your traffic maximizes your sales.
Let's begin by setting up our directory structure:
/web/include : this is where your lib files will be for your cgi scripts
/web/ : this is where your cgi scripts will reside
/web/config : this will be where the configuration files will be placed
/web/logs : this is where your impressions logs, and click logs will go
/web/banners/affiliate1 : this is where your affiliate banners will go
/web/banners/affiliate2
/web/banners/affiliate3
With that being said, let's start with making the log lib file (CLICK HERE):
This log object will be used in all of our programs to log traffic, and to log errors. Just to run down what this object does- it creates a directory in the /web/logs area where it keeps all the logs for that day. What it logs, depends on what you send to the add function of the object.
This piece of code is the impressions script. This will log the traffic, which actually gets to see an image (CLICK HERE):
As you might have noticed this script needs a banner.conf file located in /web/conf directory. What this file does is get the exact location of a picture, or an image. For example:
Girl1:/web/banners/affiliate1/bigems.gif
Girl2:/web/banners/affiliate3/blonde.jpg
Just for now, we have shown you how to keep track of your image impressions. One must note that some people might have it cache, and they might not be counted again, but we are only concerned with uniques anyway. Now comes the redirection script. (CLICK HERE for Example)
The redirect.conf looks something like this:
biggirls:http://www.boobsquad.com
klixxx:http://www.klixxx.com
An example of how it will look in HTML:
Here is another package that is required to execute the code above: (CLICK HERE)
We will leave parsing huge log files for later, to generate your stats. Instead of typing all of this code in, we have provided a site on the Web where you can download the source code, and examples from this directory at: www.differentialsoftware.com/klixxx/Article_1/.
Levi Stanley is an accomplished programmer, working with some of the premier industry leaders. He is the co-owner of DifferentialSoftware.com and OpticBurn.com, and can be reached at: levi@differentialsoftware.com.
|
Printer
Friendly Version