Walter our lead developer has been working hard on an update to CrankyAds that is very important – it impacts our ability to report accurate statistics.
I’ll let Walter explain the details below, but in a nutshell, CrankyAds is now much better at distinguishing a real visitor to your website (thus a real impression of your ad media) from robots – “bots” – that visit your site for other reasons that are not humans, but are often counted as so in statistics tracking.
This means that when you look at the impression and click rates on your ad campaigns, you know that the numbers more closely represent real humans.
Here’s a breakdown from Walter to explain how we do it -
In the early days of the Internet it was as easy to track users coming to
your site. Not so much these days. Website traffic today is made up of two
very different visitors, Users and Bots. Users are real people that come to
your site (either from a computer, iPad or mobile phone) and Bots are
computers masquerading as users accessing your site. In order to record
accurate Impression and Click data it’s important to filter out bots and
only consider real users as traffic.There are a few techniques we use to identify bots, but the simplest is
looking at the User Agent string. The User Agent string is an identifier
that identifies the visitor as either a person or a bot. Bots that use this
technique are usually legitimate services like search engines that have a
reason for looking at your site and, as good Internet citizens, want you to
know who they are. You can find a list of common browser and bot User Agent
strings here (http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php).However, not all bots are willing to identify themselves, so we need to
apply other techniques. The next simplest is to ignore visitors that come
from well-known bot servers. Although this technique is quite straight
forward, we can’t check every well-known bot server since the list is quite
large and checking them for each impression would slow down our server. So
here we have to contend ourselves with checking only the most active bot
servers.Finally our last method for detecting bots involves knowing a little about
how bots differ from real users. Bots mostly care about the content on your
website and ignore all the functionality and interactive aspects, which
means that Bots usually don’t execute javascript. So instead of recording an
impression or click whenever they happen we instead add a bit of javascript
to record the impression or click. When a bot loads the page or follows a
click but doesn’t execute the associated javascript we ignore that visit.So overall the problem of collecting accurate Impression and Click data
hinges on the ability to identify bots and ignore them from the list of
statistics. And for CrankyAds we want to make sure you get the best most
accurate statistics available.
How can I use “Liberty Reserve” as payment option?
Hi,
At the moment only PayPal is available as a payment option. We’ll be looking to add more options in the future.
One you may want to consider is http://2co.com/ because it operates in countries PayPal doesn’t.
Question: where can we see the statistics – or can we? I’ve looked through the FAQs and done searches and looked in the plugin and in my CrankyAds account but haven’t figured out whether we can see them or not. I have an advertiser inquiring about whether I can tell them how many impressions their ad is getting.
Hi Gail,
The Advertiser can log into http://www.crankyads.com/Manager and see the statistics on their ads directly (both views and clicks).Â
You can see those statistics as well in your Pending/Active/Cancelled campaigns list when you click the “More Info” button.
Cheers
Walter
oops
Hey Everyone,
Just looking for a few “success stories” so far with CrankyAds. I’m counting on ya! Building traffic and being patient…but looking for some inspiration. LOL…yes, Yaro sometimes isn’t enough. (sorry, Yaro!)Â
Hi Kenneth,
I wonder why you wrote this comment here. It’s not exactly related to the subject of the blog post?
We have many websites who are using CrankyAds and making money, including my own, GideonShalwick.com, trafficgenerationcafe.com and greynomadtimes.com, and a few others as well.Â
We only just started the service though, so it’s very early days. I would recommend you test your own site, that’s the only way to know if it works. Just because other people make money or don’t doesn’t mean you will or won’t.
Yaro
Yaro,
Â
LOL. I thought I was commenting on your post about “giving it time”.  My bad for commenting here. I did, in fact, install CrankyAds and have it running on the only blog I have that is currently getting traffic. I removed all other ads as well…which I thought would motivate advertisers because they’ll see I don’t just “throw” ads around on my space.
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BTW, it’s a pleasure that you replied to me. I’ve been a fan for a long time and am kind of in “awe” of you. Thanks for taking the time!