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Hi,
I purchased the VAST plugin and am using it to show video pre-rolls. In order to maximize my revenue, I need data on how my ads are filling by my users. Many ad partners provide tracking pixels which can be placed inside players and make calls to their servers so you can see things like:
– Player load event (did the player even load?)
– Ad request event (did the player call for an ad?)
– Pre-roll start (Was an ad returned and did it begin to be watched?)
– Ad click event (Did the user click on the ad?)
– Pre-roll complete (Did the user watch the entire pre-roll?)Right now I’m using the Google Analytics integration you offer, but it doesn’t give me the detail I need. I can see how much of the content video was watched and slice by campaign, but it doesn’t tell me things about the ad itself. Are users skipping the ad? Are they clicking out? Are ads even filling?
As a VAST/VPAID add-on user, I need to be able to track ad events so that I can optimize my ad waterfalls and troubleshoot when necessary.
Let me know if you have any questions on this. Happy to help where I can!
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Hello Matthew,
each time the player loads there is a request for the VAST XML. So if your ad provide monitors the number of ad requests, you know how many times the player loaded.
The pre-roll start event is also implemented (as well as all the quartiles and ad finised – pre-roll complete). Of course the same goes for ad click.
So it appears to me all of the above is provided by the VAST standard.
Could you please provide some details about the tracking pixels?
Could you please provide a test VAST XML from your ad provider, so we can check it out?
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Martin,
Yes, we can get ad start events, clicks, etc, from our ad providers. The problem is marrying it up with third party reporting data. For example, say we get visitors from Google, Facebook, and Pinterest. Through our ad providers, we can see the overall performance, but we aren’t able to segregate performance by source or channel. If we were able to use third party tracking, we might be able to see that Facebook performs better than Google, and allocate more of our own marketing efforts there. Let me know if that makes sense.
Thanks!
Matt
Hello Matthew,
could you please post any guide for that setup? It appears to me you would need a different tracking pixel for each event type and also make it different based on referrer (can you use GET URL query arguments for that).
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Martin,
Can you send me your email? I can send you what those tags look like but prefer not to post them in a public forum.
Thanks,
Matt
