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Estimating the effectiveness of advertising campaigns
To analyze visitors coming from different sources, the system uses 'advertising campaigns (or actions)'. To start an advertising action, you should provide visitors with a specially created link taking them to your site. This link should contain a special parameter. Its presense in the URL means that this visitor should be assigned to a special group to make further analisys possible.
An URL with some advertising campaign specified in it looks like this:
http://www.site.com?adv=advname
adv is the name of that special parameter (it is specified in the system settings),
advname is the name of an advertising action
The advertising action can be an advertisement you paid for on another site, a banner, a link to your site in a mailing list, link exchange, advertisements on search engines, etc. Reports on advertising campaigns include information about the number of downloads visitors make, about the number of licenses they purchase and the sum you earn thanks to a particular advertising campaign.
Let us take some examples of using this mechanism in practice.
For example, you pay a certain amount of money and agree upon including information about your site/product into some newsletter. You tell the owner of the newsletter the text of the message and give him your URL of the following type http://www.site.com?adv=newsletter . Now all visitors coming with the help of this link can be singled out from the overall stream of visitors, grouped and analyzed separately. You will know how many visitors come, how many of them download the distribution file, how many licenses are sold and how much money you make. And, finally, you will know if adding your information to the newletter covers the expenses.
For example, you submit your program to some archive, say, download.com. Use the field for the URL of your site to specify the address in the form of http://www.site.com?adv=downloadcom and you will know from reports how many licenses are sold due to your submission to that archive.
Download the demo-version and you'll see what kind of the analytic data you'll have by using SharewareStatistics system.
An example of generated reports is available in Demo reports
If you want to use a URL without parameters to start your advertising action or if you want to hide from visitors the fact that they follow an advertising link to get to your site, read about how to do it in the FAQ section.
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