tracking ad clicks in database

[Intelliflex]

Good Day All...

I am getting significant advertisers on the site and I want to track the ad click-throughs. The best way I can think is to have the ad image "on-click" event write an entry to a table in the database with the ad id and a date/time stamp and then I can write reports against that table.

Assuming this is the best way to acomplish this, how would I connect to the database, as it is encrypted in the web.config file? Is there a call in any of the dlls I can use to open and close the connection?

Feel free to throw out ideas or alternatives here...

Thanks!

[nickc]

Use jQuery to make an asynchronous request to a logger aspx, mapped to onclick in Page_Load:

Code: Select all

AdButton.OnClientClick = "javascript:$.ajax({url: '/_eventlogger.aspx', data: 'a=AdClick&o=" + AdName + "&p=" + Convert.ToString(_ProductId) + "', cache: false });

The logger can then be completely outside the Able universe, so you decide on connectString, etc....

Code: Select all

public partial class _eventlogger : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        string _action = Request.QueryString["a"] + "";
        string _object = Request.QueryString["o"] + "";
        int _product = Convert.ToInt32(Request.QueryString["p"] + "");
        PageEventLogger pel = new PageEventLogger(HttpContext.Current, SiteInformation.Current);
        PageEventLogger.PageEventAction pea;
        try
        {
            pea = (PageEventLogger.PageEventAction)Enum.Parse(typeof(PageEventLogger.PageEventAction), _action);
        }
        catch
        {
            pea = PageEventLogger.PageEventAction.Button_Click;
        }
        pel.LogPageEvent(pea, _product, _object);
    }
}

[Intelliflex]

Nick

Thanks for the quick reply. Good code, but I think for reporting purposes, the database would be a better route. Let me elaborate a bit more. Let say I have a side bar that has 5 images that link to other outside websites. I want to be able to run reports aganst a table where I can search for ads for a particular advertiser, either by name or account number, and also by date range, as I will track a date stamp. This will be much easier letting SQL handle the searches for the date ranges. Basically "pay-per-click" advertising.

What I had in mind was to create a table that had account number, account name, datestamp, and IP address fields. This way I can pass this information to a stored procedure that will write to the table. On the report side, I'll use another stored procedure that will filter for a single advertiser, a date range, and filter out multiple clicks from the same IP address per day. I want to run reports for us that has all advertiser information grouped by advertiser, but also a report that is automatically emailed to the advertiser every month to show traffic.

I can hard code the username and password for the database, but keeping security in mind, I was thinking there might be something in Able code that I could call to connect and disconnect the database.

Thanks again for your help!

[nickc]

In my example, the PageEventLogger class looks after extracting the appropriate values from context and writing to the database. It's basically the DAL for the SessionLog and PageEventLog tables in my database.