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Using the Hit List Ad Manager

What are online ads, and what do they typically look like?

Hit List allows users to track all of their online advertising via the Advertising Manager. Usually your ads are "External", meaning banners on another site that allow visitors to come to your site, or "Internal", meaning banners that point elsewhere within your own site or go offsite altogether. An example of each:

External: You are X computer company, and have an ad banner on ZDNet that promotes a particular computer model or models, and when visitors to ZDNet click on that banner they come to you. You are paying ZDNet x $$ for this banner and it usually runs for x days/weeks/months/etc.

Internal, first case: You are again X computer company, and you sell a lot of computers. A CD-ROM supplier, Y company, pays you to have an ad banner for their website on your home page, that people will go to from your home page and (hopefully) buy Y's CD-ROM drives as a result.

Internal, second case: You are again X computer company, and you are very large. You have ad banners (or links that serve the same effect) from your Asian, European and American manufacturing divisions on your corporate home page that permit Executive Management to "surf" about the company's sites easily and quickly obtain information about division performance.

Hit List can create reports that show how well any or all of these ads running on your site are doing and how well your External ads are doing. These reports can be categorized by the name of the ad, by the HTML page that displayed the ad, the site that ran the ad or by high-level ad groups. After you define your ad groups, you might want to run the built-in Advertising Report (internal) and Advertising Report (external) or look at the several dozen report elements in the Toolbox that relate to ads.

How do I know what kind of ads I have?

If you are not the webmaster, you will usually need to talk with this person to get the specific URLs associated with the ads you are running, whether External or Internal. While this information is in the logs, the webmaster will know how he or she has set up the website to show these ads, which directories the ad images are in, and so forth. This is critical information to know before building your Hit List database, as the Ad Manager must be set up BEFORE building the database from your logfiles.

If the webmaster isn't available, you may have to surf the ad URLs on your site (or on external sites) to determine the ad banner URLs, but remember that this may not provide all the information you need (it's in the logs, however).

What are Ad Groups?

Ad groups are collections of ad URLs that you might want to analyze as a group. Frequently this is used to consolidate ads from each company that runs ads on your site, or to consolidate ad campaigns that you run on external sites. In this way, you can create a report that is limited to just showing ads from that company. Or you can organize ads into categories based on the subject matter (News, Sports, Entertainment, etc.). Each ad is a member of exactly one ad group.

How do I set up the Hit List Ad Manager?

Impression URLs

Ads running on your site (Internal) generally have at least one "impression" URL associated with them. This is normally the URL of a GIF that represents the ad (e.g. /graphics/MyAd.GIF). It can also be the results of a CGI, ISAPI or NSAPI program (e.g. /scripts/ShowAds.DLL?SportsAd1). You may associate more than one impression URL with each ad in cases where the creative execution of the ad changes over time. Wildcards are allowed but note that the first ? character in the impressions URL is not interpreted as a wildcard but as a separator between an application (like /scripts/ShowAds.DLL) and its argument (SportsAd1 in this example).

Click-Through URLs

Ads may also have "click-through" URLs associated with them. These are either URLs on your web site or on an external web site that visitors jump to when they click an ad. If the ads point to an external website, this jump is normally handled by a "redirect" program like MWRedir.EXE/DLL that we provide, or Redir.dll from Microsoft.

Tip: To track ads running on other sites (External), have each distinct ad banner jump to a specific page on your site or use a uniquely identifying query portion of the URL. For example, an ad banner for Creative1 on Site1 might jump to http://www.yourcompany.com/default.htm?AdName=Creative1&AdSource=Site1. In this example, your web server would display your usual home page (/default.htm) but would note the unused query portion in the log. This allows Hit List to uniquely identify it. In this example, the click-through URL for the ad named Creative1 would be /default.htm?AdName=Creative1&* .

Tip: If your ads go directly to an external web site (usually the "click-through" URL), this jump is NOT recorded in your logs and, therefore, not tracked by Hit List. You should consider using a redirect program to handle this external "jump" (instead of a simple link to the external site) because it will record the external jump in your log AND jump the visitor to the appropriate place. Se Hit List Help/Redirect for more information.

You may associate more than one click-through URL with each ad in cases where the destination of the ad changes over time. Wildcards are allowed but note that the first ? character in the click-through URL is not interpreted as a wildcard but as a separator between an application (like /scripts/mwredir.DLL) and its argument (?http://www.AnotherPlace.com/, for example).

Creating a new Ad Group

Click the New button next to "Ad Groups" and enter the name of the new Group.

Modifying an existing Ad Group

Select the Group at issue in "Ad Groups" and click Change. Now enter the GroupÍs new name and click OK.

Deleting an existing Ad Group

Select the Ad Group in the Ad Groups list and click Delete. This removes the Ad Group but does not delete any data from the Hit List database.

Creating a new Ad

Select the Ad Group that the ad should be added to, then click the New button next to "Ad Names" and enter the name of the new ad.

Modifying an Existing Ad

Select the ad in "Ad Names" and click Change. Now enter the adÍs new name and hit OK.

Deleting an Existing Group

Select the ad in "Ad Names" and click Delete. This removes the ad but does not delete any data from the Hit List database.

Adding a New Impression or Click-Through URL

Select the ad that the new URL should be added to from "Ad Names" then click the New button next to the Impression URLs and Click-Through URLs list. Enter the complete URL or URL pattern. If the URL requires a query (e.g. /cgi-bin/AdClicker.exe?SciFiAd5), simply separate the query from the application with a question mark as shown in the example. You may want to simply paste in the URL from the logfile if it's available.

Modifying an Impression or Click-Through URL

Select the URL from "Impression URLs" or "Click-Through URLs" then click Change. Now enter the new URL or URL pattern.

Deleting an Impression or Click-Through URL

Select the URL from "Impression URLs" or "Click-Through URLs" then click Delete. This disassociates the URL from the currently selected ad but does not delete any data from the Hit List database.

Importing Ad Definitions

You can use the Import button at the bottom of the Ad Manager to copy ad definitions from other logfile databases. After hitting Import, browse to a logfile database (usually a .mwd file) and then double-click it. After a brief pause, your Ad Groups, Ad Names, Impression and Click-Through URLs should reappear in the Ad Manager.

Troubleshooting the Ad Manager

I have everything correctly set up in the Advertising Manager, but I don't get results from Ad reports.

1) First, make sure that you set up the Advertising Manager BEFORE you updated the database with the log files for the specific date range.

2) Second, make sure you are not globally preventing images (*.gif, *.jpg) from being imported in the database in the Updates tab of the Options. If you would like to allow all advertising images into the database but exclude all other graphics, it is suggested that you keep all non-advertising images in one directory (e.g. /graphics) and all advertising images in another directory (/ads). This way in the Updates tab, you can enter /graphics/*.gif,/graphics/.*jpg to filter out images.

3) Third, make sure you know EXACTLY what the URLs should look like. You may believe you already know what your ad URLs look like, but many users have spent considerable time entering data in the Ad Manager only to find that ad-related reports "give them zeros" when run. This is often because they have not put the exact URL as seen in their logs into the Ad Manager, and thus it cannot calculate ad traffic correctly. So take the time to look directly at your log files, in a text editor like Notepad or Wordpad, and determine what the ad URLs look like, pasting them into the Ad Manager, as either "Impression" or "Click-Through" URLs.