Although the major three search engines have apis for their PPC engines, PPV engines do not. This brings up the question of how to track the cost of each impression.
To get accurate stats I could scrape the reports that are available in each of the engines, and I guess this would be the best and most accurate way of doing it. However to begin with, my tracker can hold average click costs per traffic source per campaign. As impressions are made the current click cost is looked up from the relevant traffic source and recorded with the click. I’ll likely implement some kind of scraping code later on when I have got more of the other essential features implemented.
What I would really really like is if each engine could pass the click cost back to the tracker in the url, and my tracker could handle this easily with a bit of configuration, but it is very unlikely to be implemented.
One other possibility would be to scrape keywords and associated costs – perhaps this would be easier…
Comment by Joe Brewer — January 18, 2010 @ 5:00 pm