Adstats is a powerful application written in Java and PHP for a leading UK Affiliate Marketing company.
In 2008 the main search engines were Google, MSN and Yahoo providing consumers to the affiliates web site and there were many Networks that handled the transaction for the businesses selling there products. The disjointed nature of a this relatively new industry created the following problems:
- Your data was everywhere! Your search keywords were in the search engines, but your account information (ie were the clicks successful) was provided by the networks.
- There was no common application that could import all this data and tell you how profitable your keywords are. If you don’t know that you could get hit by a costly keyword, that lots of people clicked on, but didn’t buy the product.
- Consolidating these reports could take days of importing the data and using excel to analyse the data
If only there was an easier way… There was and Adstats was born, written solely for Affili8 New Media.
Highlights
The highlights include:
- Automatically import your data, in XML or CSV (these were the main formats at the time)
- View your data as an Excel spreadsheet, highlighting the major keywords that are gaining the highest money, or losing the most money!
- View reports from a PHP based website.
- Configure the reports via the website, handy as some networks would change their file structures without notice!
Technology
The main components used are:
- Java based import engine: This monitored a directory and identified and imported the data automatically into MySQL based on the rules stored within the application.
- Apache POI: Easily create beautiful Excel spreadsheets using Java, why keep all that data in a web page when you can email a spreadsheet?
- Apache with PHP: PHP was chosen as this was the skill set within the company, allowing for the wesite to be extended internally.
- MySQL 5: The de facto Open Source database, need we say more!
More?
If you want more information about the Adstats application, please contact us.