Commercial Break (A phpAds Primer) - The Number Game (
Page 8 of 9 )
Finally, the crown jewels, at least as far as your
advertisers are concerned - the numbers which demonstrate how many eyeballs have
seen their banner, and how many clicks have resulted. In order to assist you in
generating these reports, phpAds comes with a fairly capable statistics module,
which can provide your advertisers with hard data on what their hard-earned
dollars have really bought them.
You can access the phpAds statistics
module from the main control panel, by selecting an advertiser and hitting the
Go button.
phpAds will produce a summary
report of the number of views and clicks per banner for that
advertiser.
As you can see, phpAds will
also do a rough calculation in order to produce what it calls a click-through
ratio - essentially, the percentage of views that were converted into actual
clicks. The higher this number, the better it is for the advertiser (and your
bank account).
You can also have phpAds produce a weekly report for you,
by asking it for detailed statistics. In this case, you'll get a very neat
little graph showing you the activity over the past seven days; you can even
drill down to see a more detailed view for each day.
Note that your PHP build must support the GD graphics
library in order to build these graphs.
This kind of data is very useful
to both you and your advertisers, in judging the popularity of your site, and
the value obtained per advertising dollar.
It should be noted at this
point that these reports are not only available to you, the site administrator -
you can even have your clients view them directly, via phpAds' client interface,
available at http://your-server/your-phpAds-directory/client/. Remember the
username and password you entered for the client at the beginning? These can be
used by the client to access click statistics directly.
