One of the really boring bits of my job which doesn’t involve explosions (all the best bits involve explosions), is the tedious process of working out which people who saw an advert or website coverage bought a game. Big companies have an army of calculator-brained accountant\/web developer geek hybrids to worry about this nonsense, while the game designers do more important stuff like eat canapes and quaff champagne. In my case, I have to do it.<\/p>\n
Bah.<\/p>\n
(The sales tracking, not the quaffing)<\/p>\n
Double Bah.<\/p>\n
People who know me well, will realise that peversely, I love this sort of stuff. However, getting it working properly is a nightmare. I use google as my analytics provider, and BMT Micro as my payment company. I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to get it all to work properly. In theory this is what happens:<\/p>\n
In practice, this is what currently happens:<\/p>\n
I may have fixed this, by completely re-doing all of the javascript for the analytics on all the pages on the site I’m tracking, but it will take a few days for me to see if that’s really the case. To add confusion, I don’t have access to the code on the actual post-buy page, because that’s a secure page hosted by BMTMicro, so debugging this takes longer than usual. Google have written dozens of articles on how it works, almost all of which is contradictory. Thanks guys!<\/p>\n
To really hammer home how clueless I am at that, I have picked up a stalker.<\/p>\n
My stalker is an advert for an iiyama monitor that I looked at once, which follows me everywhere. It’s the digital equivilant of a girl you smiled at in a bar once who then follows you everywhere for the next 30 days. Creepy, and annoying, but more importantly, it’s evidence that everyone else has their customer tracking down to a fine art, and I’m still acting like some newcomer blundering about in clown shoes wondering who buys his games.<\/p>\n
Bah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the really boring bits of my job which doesn’t involve explosions (all the best bits involve explosions), is the tedious process of working out which people who saw an advert or website coverage bought a game. Big companies have an army of calculator-brained accountant\/web developer geek hybrids to worry about this nonsense, while<\/p>\n