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Visual Data Systems, based in Columbia, Maryland is a leading supplier of online marketing, website design, technology solutions, education and consultation. Founded in 1993, Visual Data Systems has over 15 years of extensive experience in the vacation rental industry, the not-for-profit sector and e-commerce with clients thoughout North and Central America and the Caribbean. Visual Data Systems offers our clients a variety of products and services including website design, online marketing tools including online survey management, managed email solutions, search engine optimization & marketing, Integration with rental/ property management software and business and technology consultation that has resulted in over 500 million dollars in online transactions.

 
AdTracker
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Advertising Referral Reporting

AdTracker

AdTracker is a real-time advertising referral reporting tool . AdTracker technology shows real-time user access to your web site, broken down by advertising campaign and accessible from the your online administration console.

AdTracker Overview

The Real-Time Ad Tracker is a software tool for tracking the number of visits to a website that are generated by a specific advertisement. Unlike other tracking mechanisms, the Real-Time Ad Tracker provides:

  1. Tracking any number of separate ads (up to 50,000 simultaneous ads) with no setup or configuration required for each new ad.
  2. Instantaneous results, charted online in real time as visitors arrive.
  3. Total visits are recorded per day and summarized by week, month, and year.
  4. Graphical and tabular displays with user-selectable time-frames.
  5. Comparative display of any number and combination of ads.
  6. Ability to change status of each ad as active and inactive.
  7. Add your own description to be displayed in the Legend.

How it works:

The Real-Time Ad Tracker allows a URL link to the website to be published in an email, online, or even written in a print ad to be typed in by hand. The link will be the same as the website URL with the addition of three identifying characters that are chosen to be unique for each ad. The three characters can be any upper case or lower case letter or any digit, in any order; however, they will revert to all uppercase in the reporting. This provides over 50,000 distinct combinations that can be used to encode and track any advertisement. For example, the following are all valid ad tracker links and will be separately tracked.

  • http://www.your_domain.com/ad1
  • http://www.your-domain.com/VDS
  • http://www.your-domain.com/411

When an ad link is viewed, the user is immediately taken to your home page while the referral is tracked with reference to your code as follows: http://www.your-domain.com/?ref=AD1. The user's experience of the website is not affected at all by the ad tracking.

To create your ad link, you simply have to specify the unique 3-character code and place the link where it will be clicked on or copied from. As soon as the ad is published, you can login to your Visual Data Systems administration page and see the results as the visitors arrive! (You must refresh your display to see new visitors.)

Once traffic for an ad dies down, the 3-character ad code may be reused for convenience.

Administration

On the administration page, you may change the status of each ad as active or inactive, or delete the campaign entirely. Only the ads that are active will display on the reporting page. You may also assign a detailed description of each ad code, whether it be the web or print publisher, and advertising time period. This will be displayed when you click on "View Active Ad Legend" on the AdTracker Report page.

If you want to direct the visitor to a specific landing page other than your home page, edit the Landing Page field. Note that this entry is for the landing page NOT the complete URL. The Landing Page may be static or dynamic as shown in the examples below:

  • rental/house.html?PMSUnitID=AHOYM
  • guestadvantage/guest_advantage.html