Tracking clicks and conversions is critical for measuring the performance of your ad campaigns and optimizing spend. But that alone is not enough.
To have a complete view of the total effectiveness of your ad campaigns you need to measure ‘View Through Attribution’.
ViewThrough Attribution (VTA) enables a conversion to be rewarded to the specific impression viewed by the user.
You can measure the number of conversions that happened after a user saw your ad. but didn’t click it. This way, you can see which impressions are driving what installs, regardless of whether they are being attributed or not.
For example: A user saw your banner 5 times, clicked on the last view, was redirected to the store page and installed your app. The conversion would be attributed only to the click, but each of the 5 impressions has influenced and contributed in leading the user to the desired action (installing your app).
VTA is based on tracking ad impressions. This is the first step in attributing a conversion to an impression as it provides advertisers with information on when and where ads are being served.
View-through tracking is increasingly important for:
- attributing conversions not only to the ‘last click’
- understanding the relationship between how many times the ad is displayed and when the user clicks on the ad
- collecting useful data to help advertisers analyze and optimize campaigns
- measuring the brand effectiveness
How to add impression tracking url(s) in the Bucksense console
Bucksense offers impression tracking for both banner and video campaigns.
Follow these steps to set up impression tracking url(s):
Setup Bucksense as a media source in your third party attribution tracking partner (see here). Once setup, you will get a tracking URL to be notified every time an impression is delivered and your creative has been viewed by the user
Banner Campaigns (see here)
Click the CAMPAIGNS TAB and select from the drop-down menu ADD A CAMPAIGN, you will access the info & supply settings section.
Click the Impression Tracking field and a pop-up window will appear.
Paste your tracking URL in the appropriate field. For example https://sampletrackingurl.com.
(Bucksense suggests to use HTTPS connections to be sure to track all the impressions).
You can add different Macros (see here) to your impression tracking URL to get additional information.
To do this, you need to add URL parameters to your impression tracking URL: first of all add a question mark (?) which is the first parameter prefix, then, add the first parameter, an equal sign (=) and the Macro that corresponds with the parameter.
You can manually insert the Macro, or, simply click on that Macro in the list to automatically add it.
For example https://sampletrackingurl.com?param1=%%CAMPAIGN_ID%%
In this sample ‘param1’ is the parameter and %%CAMPAIGN_ID%% is the Macro being passed through the parameter.
You can append multiple parameters and macros by adding an ampersand (&) to each additional parameter.
For example:
https://sampletrackingurl.com?param1=%%CAMPAIGN_ID%%¶m2=%%SUPPLY_TYPE%%¶m3=%%PUB_ID%%
Every time an ad is served to the user, the impression tracking url is called, and, your tracking platform captures the values populated by each Macro, so the data are collected for your tracking reports.
Video Campaigns (see here)
Under the CAMPAIGNS TAB > VIDEO CREATIVES, select the Tracking events form.
Click on the add event button, select the event you want to track and paste the related tracking URL.
Additional Macros can be added to the tracking URL to get more information (see above how to add Macros to your tracking URL).
For example: if you want track the ‘Complete’ event, and, get additional informations about the device ip address and the id of the carrier, select Complete from the drop down menu, click on the Url field and a pop up window will be opened.
Paste your Event tracking URL and add the related Macros, then click on Save.
Click on the Add Event button to add events to track (please note that you can set only one URL per event).