WARNING: Knowing about or possessing a tool does not instantly make you an expert in its use. In the same way that buying an axe doesn’t make you a lumberjack or wearing a helmet makes you a racing car driver.
Ghostery is a plugin for all popular browsers that will show you, and also block if you want to, all the various tracking technology on a particular webpage.
SPA stands for Single Page Application. It’s the proper term for a website (or part of a website) that have a fixed URL and dynamically updates as buttons are pressed etc. So these are sites where overlays and galleries open up in the same page without you having to wait for a whole new page to load.
Ok so you need to choose an adserver/tag manager/analytics tool/DMP/whatever.
But there are just so many, each with their own smarmy sales people, glossy one pagers and confusing feature lists.
In these sorts of situations the usual approach people take is to put together a grid of questions, send them around to potential vendors and then put them side to side before going with the cheapest making a decision.
Me: What’s the CPA looking like on this campaign?
Colleague: Erm let me check… Currently it’s at hash D I V slash zero exclamation mark.
Me: …Sorry I asked, I’ll check the tracking again.
Disclaimer – The below are merely thoughts, presented in a haphazard way, I am not saying that the below is necessarily a good idea or even an idea that could ever work. It most certainly won’t be ready by end of play Thursday.
Most adblockers work by blocking certain third party domains from loading content into the browser. Domain blacklists are created and maintained that contain all the known URLs that serve up advertising.
The way around this, as some sites are looking at, is to create entirely native ad units; but these are expensive for clients and creative agencies to work with and don’t work for the wide range of small blogs and websites (that actually make up a great deal of the Internet) trying to make a bit of money from some ads. The other problem with native ad units is that clients need some way to third party track them so they can corroborate how many times they have been loaded and what users who see/click on them do next. It’s no good if the ads visibly appear but the trackers around them are blocked.
What if the third party adserver went entirely native, I know that’s sounds like a contradiction of terms but stay with me. The way this could work would be similar to how many server to server tracking solutions work currently but with a twist that I’ll get on to in a second.
Website addresses or URLs are complicated things that are actually made up of many parts.
This is a URL with all it’s different bits colour coded:
https://www.client.com/shop/offer?source=display&campaign=summer#section2
Smart pixels are a relatively new type of tag that goes onto a website, the latest pixels from the likes of Google Adwords, Facebook and Twitter are this type of pixel. They are “smart” instead of “dumb” like other types of pixels because you can program them after the fact.
Vanity URLs, also called “friendly URLs” or “FURLs” (pronounced to rhyme with Earl) are short catchy version of web page addresses designed to be easier to remember and type in manually.
e.g. “go to client.com/product”
It may not be our fault, it is however our problem
Examples:
