What is the best way to track performance of web banners?

[Jameslerner12]

Is there a report that exists in the adobe suite or is it a custom report? I'm trying to understand the performance of my banner slotting which ones are getting the most traffic and attributing to revenue.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Are these Ad Banners (served from an Ad Server)? Or like internal promotional banners?

The problem is that most ads are loaded via iframes and often have lazy load... I don't know if it would be possible to know what banner is actually loaded or interacted with....

I think this would have to be custom code, and I'm not sure how feasible it is....

That said, there may ways to do this depending on what ad system you are using.... but it would need to be customized to that solution....

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Now, if you are talking about promotional banners... stuff your developers / CMS are loading to the page, you should be able to create a custom solution to track this....

Some people might trigger a separate action for the banner (in an s.tl() call)... me personally, I would want to keep my server calls leaner, so I would likely create tracking into my page view to indicate the banner or banners that were loaded. Then I would create click tracking on the banners to track engagement. I would probably also create an internal campaign type of tracking (similar to my external campaigns, but separate) to track attribution to conversions/revenue.

[Jameslerner12]

Internal promotion banners on the homepage direct to a different part of the site.

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

oh good.. that is a lot easier

That would be the second half on my original post... 

In our sites, I have a custom data layer that our developers populate... so all the banners and info that I need to know about that would be populated in to the data layer when the page is loaded,.. then I read from and build tracking about the "banner impressions" right in my page view call..

Depending on the type of banner, I will sometimes code a click action for the banners (OR I will just rely on Activity Map data - it depends on what you need to know, in what granularity and how good your existing Activity Map set up is....).

I would definitely create the concept of an "internal campaign"... so the banner links will add a new "?icid=" (internal campaign id) or a few "?itm_source=...&itm_campaign=...." etc (if you are more familiar with using UTMs you could replicate that for "internal tracking" variations). On your banners, make sure that the team posting them adds the proper internal campaigns to the links, and that they are following the structure of the campaign (just like your external campaigns).

Then set up a custom eVar(s) for your internal campaign tracking, set it up with a default attribution model - I like Visit - you can always use the custom attribution modeling in Workspace as well) and then just like your external campaigns, you should be able to get attribution from your internal campaigns like you would from external... and you can also look at cross sections of external campaigns in conjunction with your internal campaigns to see how they interact.

[Jameslerner12]

going thru the custom evar route or piggybacking an existing evar, and is there a way to auto append like a variable to page URL, so if some clicks on slot 1 on the home page, it tracks as "slot 1"?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Depending on how good your JS skills are, yes

It might just be easier to ask your developers to append the positions.

So let's say you have 3 banners - with link1, link2 and link3

Your website developers will have slots for the banners (and I assume code to hide the hole if no banner is provided).... it might be easier for them to append code on the banners to add the slots positions as campaigns (I assume that is what you are asking.. rather than getting your users to append the campaigns manually).

If that isn't an option, you should be able to use querySelectorAll to find all the banners (and the links associated to them), and use a loop to modify the links to append the slot positions.... but your developers should be able to do it more efficiently, which is why I would ask them first