I have a client who wants to measure the effectiveness of a banner campaign. The difficulty is that their banners are served by a third party ad server which uses redirects to track campaigns. The published banner links to a long complicated URL under a 3rd party domain which is then redireted to my clients site. This allows the network to track campaigns. What this means I suspect is that I can't pick up these referrals using logfile analysis (Clicktracks Pro)as the referral field is blank. Are my suspicions correct? If so are there any other ways of validating the figures provided to my client by the advertising network.
Does the third party let you have access to the stats it collects? If so, try and use their information instead of Clicktracks.
Well we could but we want to follow them through the site - look at Return on Advertising Spend and do some segmentation. WE can't do any of this with the stats we get from the 3rd party. And it takes 4 - 6 weeks by which tme the numbers are out of date.