The Chronicles of Stuffed Guys

For the past several days we were investigating the possibility of tracking AdSense clicks with Stuffed Tracker.

This is actually a popular feature request, since so many sites now depend on the revenue from AdSense. Tracking AdSense clicks in Stuffed Tracker seemed like a great idea. Not only would you get an understanding of how much AdSense clicks you have on your sites, but thanks to Stuffed Tracker you will also see the sources of the traffic that bring you most of the AdSense clicks (plus the pages on which the clicks were made and in IE even the target of the link on which the visitor has clicked).

To cut the long story short — tracking AdSense clicks with Stuffed Tracker is possible!

We have a complete description of how to set this up in our forums:
http://forums.stuffedguys.com/index.php?showtopic=77

PS. Happy New Year to everyone!

We’ve just released a brand new version of our conversion tracking software and one of the major new features in this release is IP-based tracking.

Usually cookie-based tracking is considered to be good enough for tracking visitors and advertising effectiveness. But as we’ve found out ourselves less then a month ago there is one big reason why you urgently need your conversion tracking/web stats software to support IP-based tracking. And it is:

Safari on Mac

This doesn’t seem to be widely known or discussed on the web, but Safari browser has a default setting to reject all cookies that are coming from a 3rd party domain. And this is a real disaster for cookie-based tracking!

To illustrate the concept of a 3rd party domain and the problem that a Safari browser imposes here is a small story:

0. Once there was that wonderful person who liked to create cute stuffed puppies and kittens. Her name was Jill.

1. Jill had her own site www.stuffed-animals.tld. Visitors were coming to this site from the advertising and some of them even purchased her wonderful handmade stuffed doggies and kitties.

2. At some point Jill had realized that she needed to measure effectiveness of her advertising and understand where her purchases are coming from.

3. She has singed up for a conversion/ROI tracking service called www.bestconversion.tld which was costing here around 30 bucks a month. They gave her a special javascript tracking code and said that she should place it inside the pages of her wonderful site all filled with joyful pictures of stuffed doggies and kitties. And she did just that.

4. After sometime she discovered that www.bestconversion.tld reports do not give her any valuable information. She could see that people are coming to her site, she could even see that most of them use Macs and Safari browser (she already knew that her cute stuffed doggies are popular in the Mac community, so there was no surprise), but she didn’t see the conversions. Jill knew that in the last week she has got more then 100 sales, the reports showed her almost that number of sales tracked, but they didn’t show her the advertising source from where the converted visitors originally came from. It seemed that the service software actually saw the sales happening, but couldn’t connect them with the advertising source.

5. Jill thought that something was wrong and called up the www.besconversion.tld support, but they’ve said that there were no problems with the service from their side and that she was the one to blame. Jill stopped paying for the service because it didn’t bring her any value (and because the support people were rude).

End of the story.

So why Jill was not able to track conversions? The reason is simple.

The tracking code that www.bestconversion.tld has given to her was calling up the software located on www.bestconversion.tld domain, which logged information and tried to set a cookie in the visitor’s browser in order to identify this visitor later when he/she will make a purchase. But since most of the Jill’s visitors were using Mac and Safari that cookie was immediately rejected because it was coming from a 3rd party domain and Safari browser has a default setting to reject such cookies.

The original Jill’s page was loading from her own site – www.stuffed-animals.tld, but the cookie was being assigned from www.bestconversion.tld – a completely different domain (a 3rd party domain in this case).

If only www.bestconversion.tld developers were smart enough to use IP-tracking combined with cookie-based tracking, then the end of this story would probably be completely different.

By using cookie-based and IP-based tracking combined you get the best of the two worlds. When cookies are working properly in the browser, the visitor is tracked with a cookie. If cookies can not be set for some reason, the visitor is tracked using his/her IP.

And this is just how our Stuffed Tracker now works.

Did you know that we’ve actually invented a unique way to work with the stats in Stuffed Tracker? We’ve called it “Reports Constructor” and it is able to generate billions of different report combinations. This number might seem too weird to be true, so we modestly advertise it as “more then 1000″.

We expect that the concept behind the Reports Constructor might be unclear to some of the people working with it for the first time. So I’ve tried to describe it in detail in the FAQ section on our site.

And also yesterday I’ve created my very first Flash movie with an excellent Camtasia Studio. In the movie I did my best to visually explain how thousands of different reports could be produced with the Reports Constructor. Hopefully the video will make this clear.

Starting from tomorrow, we will begin our first PPC advertising campaign. This might seem strange that we haven’t done any PPC advertising and yet created an Excellent Conversion Tracking Tool specially for measuring effectiveness of such advertising.

But actually there is nothing strange in this. Although we haven’t done any PPC advertising ourselves we have several clients who heavily advertise through Yahoo/Overture, Google and Miva. We have developed several custom tracking solutions for them during the course of the previous 3 years. And by now we know a lot about this stuff.

But still — no actual experience.

I think I have an interesting idea how we can spice things up here. We are going to create a special landing page that will display everything that Stuffed Tracker knows about the current visitor. Where he or she arrived from, from what search engine, what he or she was searching for, what actions this visitor has performed on our site, whether he or she has downloaded files or viewed screenshots already.

In my opinion, this will be a great showcase of the actual Stuffed Tracker capabilities and a fast way to explain to the visitor what the software is all about.

Also, with the help of the split testing functionality available in Stuffed Tracker, I would be able to send the visitors from one advert to different pages of the site and then measure which pages were most effective for what actions (download of a trial!) or sales. This should clearly show if the “showcase” page is a good idea or not.