Brewsterware

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.

Since I had a few more ideas for features, and the progress of coding my dream tracker is going quite well I thought I’d post an update.

Here are a few more features that I’ll be adding in the coming weeks:

1. The ability to create ads so that the reports can show which ones are performing well.  Prosper already does this, but at the moment there is no support for adding pictures, and as platforms like facebook, myspace and the new plenty of fish platform use pictures I thought it would be a good idea to add this in.
2. The ability to add campaigns that use dayparting.  This would work a bit like the offer rotation execpt it would use mysql’s date functions to determin which offer to show.  This would enable offers to be show only between specific times, after specific dates, on specific days of the week…. the dayparting would only be limited by what mysql can do with dates.