TUNE not only provides tracking of clicks and conversions but also ad impression tracking as well. While not an essential piece of attribution, many partners and networks track impressions as another powerful metric when measuring ad performance. Instead of just tracking the metrics of conversion rates, you can also see how a banner ad would perform as far as getting clicks compared to the number of opportunities users had to click on the ad.
Impressions are used to track the first interaction with a potentially converting user. They are used to measure the performance of engagement with the banner. In the TUNE ad server, impressions are an optional metric to track unlike the click and conversion used to attribute the user to a partner’s payout. An impression is tracked each time a user loads a webpage that an impression pixel is placed. While the impression is not required to be set up with any offer, it is always a good option to set up your offers to track impressions.
Impression pixels are available for all partners approved to run an offer and are included with all display ads such as image banners, Flash banners, HTML ads, and email creative ad tags generated on the offer page.
Generating an Impression Pixel
To generate an impression pixel, first, go to an offer’s page from Offers > Manage Offers. In the Generate Tracking panel, select the partner for whom you want to generate the impression pixel. Once the tracking link is generated, check the box for Impression Pixel, and the impression pixel for this partner and offer will appear:
A partner can apply this pixel to the page the tracking link is displayed on by pasting it into the HTML of the page itself. Once the page has been updated to show the pixel, then impression tracking will start working for the partner.
Additional Parameters to Pass
Like a normal partner tracking link, an impression pixel can accept more information than just the partner and offer IDs. You can add the same parameters to the URL of the pixel code as you would when customizing a partner tracking link.
Start Session Tracking on Impression
In most cases, offers will start tracking users when they actually engage with a banner or tracking link, starting the session when they click and are redirected to the landing page. However in the case where the advertiser wants to start tracking users when they reach the banner, perhaps because they won’t integrate a tracking link in the process, or want to see the session value like how long the user converts after viewing the ad initially.
In this case, each offer comes with the option to start tracking the user on impression. When this happens, a cookie is placed in the user’s browser when they hit the page where the impression pixel is located. To enable this setting, go to an offer’s page and click Edit in the Tracking panel. Then set the Start Session Tracking setting to “Impressions”. Once you save your settings, this offer will start tracking users on impression instead of the default option to track at the click.
Note: This setting is only visible for offers using pixel tracking. The server postback method doesn’t allow for impression tracking.
When this setting is enabled, clicks will still be tracked, and tracking links will function as intended, but the session will not be affected when a click occurs.
Partners should grab the impression pixel to be placed on their web pages to start tracking normally. If they fail to implement the impression pixel then no sessions or subsequent conversions/payouts will be tracked.
Note: When the start tracking on impression setting is implemented, each session is counted towards the clicks allocated in your network’s monthly bill. This means each impression is treated as a click in regards to billing, meaning that if you have an offer that tracks impressions and has received 100,000 impressions, that will count toward the number of clicks your account is allocated each month. If you are looking to track impressions and plan on driving substantial traffic to the offer, you might incur click overage charges. Clicks for these offers do not count towards the click allocation if the session starts on impression.