Offline Storage, Tracking, Debugging, and Optimization - HTML5 Advertising - page 238

As you are aware from previous sections in the topic, cookie dropping on mobile Apple devices is accepted
only if the user has visited the cookie-dropping domain or has toggled their browser setting to accept all. While this
eliminates a huge portion of the market advertisers are looking to target, other browsers are gaining popularity on iOS
like Google's Chrome browser, which accepts cookies by default regardless of domain, and at the time of this writing,
Chrome for iOS has roughly 20,000 user ratings. While not a true measure of installs, it's still a promising number, but
with no ability to make Chrome a user's default mobile web browser (unless you “jailbreak” your iOS device), you're
sure to see more mobile Safari traffic overall than Chrome. Other browsers in the mobile landscape such as Opera
Mini handle tracking differently. For a large portion of the market share in developing countries like Africa, wired
networks are few and far between and phones with Opera Mini are the majority. However, with Opera Mini, JavaScript
is not on by default, or is nonexistent, so in these scenarios, the only form of tracking is called pixel tracking , or using
1x1 images, where a user clicks a tags in the HTML markup and the request goes through a redirect URL. In most
cases, though, JavaScript is the most common, and many analytics platforms like Google's Analytics use the tracking
approach shown in Listing 10-7.
Listing 10-7. Google Analytics Tracking Example
<script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-25177661-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script');
ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? ' https://ssl ' : ' http://www ') + '.google-
analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>
Now within HTML-based ads, you can use web analytics platforms such as the one outlined from Google
to handle your metrics. However, if JavaScript is disabled in the browser, so is JavaScript-based tracking. A good
workaround is to use image beacons , which are a 1x1 GIF images that ping a server, usually with specific query
parameters indicating session IDs or creative IDs along with activity type and a random number to cache bust.
To work one way or another, it's best to understand who your audience is. If you're targeting a bunch of mobile
devices, keep in mind that some mobile browsers do not have JavaScript on by default in some phones, such as
BlackBerry's OS5 and older and most Nokia feature phones.
Storing and Firing Offline Tracking
While there is no standard definition in offline ad tracking , there is a need for a standard, and ideally through practice
and adoption, we'll have a clean way of implementing offline in future campaigns. The vice president of development
at Crisp Media and a cofounding member of the ORMMA initiative, Nathan Carver, states the following:
“This does depend a little bit on the ad. If it is a direct response, for example, then offline doesn't
make sense. Really only brand ads benefit from offline. Ultimately, this is a space for the SDKs to
differentiate for now. A store-and-forward, or keeper/share technology could really help, but there
is no definition about the offline market right now.”
Nathan Carver