{"id":2262,"date":"2013-04-04T10:37:35","date_gmt":"2013-04-04T09:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=2262"},"modified":"2013-04-04T10:37:35","modified_gmt":"2013-04-04T09:37:35","slug":"fun-with-cookies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2013\/04\/04\/fun-with-cookies\/","title":{"rendered":"Fun with cookies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For a long time I&#8217;ve been painfully aware about how much my purchase tracking sucks, due to the following reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Google analytics tracking across domains (buy page site and main site) sucks.<\/li>\n<li>A lot of people buy from steam, or elsewhere anyway, and I can&#8217;t edit those buy pages to add tracking.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ve finally started basic attempts to put in place a more robust system, which much more accurately tracks ad-clicks (or other link data, theoretically) to confirmed sales. The procedure is essentially this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Direct adverts to a php version of the page, not html<\/li>\n<li>Have that ad pass in a url variable to indicate the source (or theoretically just grab the referrer)<\/li>\n<li>The php then stores that data in a cookie<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When a purchased copy of the game runs for the first time, it finds the cookie (this bit is tricky) and then pings my server to say &#8216;advert #3323 just resulted in a sale&#8217;. This is all done anonymously, so there is no user tracking, just an indication that there was a confirmed sale, rather than just crossing my fingers. If the customer blocks the game from contacting the server, that no big deal, but my last 2 games have some online features, so it&#8217;s unlikely.<\/p>\n<p>It will be a while before I have any actual\u00a0 data to show for this, but it should make for less random marketing decisions once I have some, and I&#8217;ll share what I have learned. Many thanks to cas for prompting me to do this stuff :D<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For a long time I&#8217;ve been painfully aware about how much my purchase tracking sucks, due to the following reasons: Google analytics tracking across domains (buy page site and main site) sucks. A lot of people buy from steam, or elsewhere anyway, and I can&#8217;t edit those buy pages to add tracking. I&#8217;ve finally started<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-right\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Continue Reading&#8230; Fun with cookies<\/span><a class=\"btn btn-secondary continue-reading\" href=\"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2013\/04\/04\/fun-with-cookies\/\">Continue Reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2263,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2262\/revisions\/2263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}