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The niceroi platform is fundamentally all about finding which variables within your traffic sources are the causes of any ROI that you are generating from an advertising campaign at the click level. Using custom variables means that the possibilities are endless for what you are capable of tracking and analyzing.

What are custom variables?

In the niceroi system these custom variables come in a few different flavors. You simply define a custom variable name and associate it with either the tracker or with a campaign, adgroup, or ad.

By associating it with a tracker you can pass that custom variable through your ad links, goals, or conversions. For example, you can create a custom variable called ‘publisher_id’ and pass over an ad networks publisher_id to your tracking url in order to determine which publishers are bringing you the best ROI on your ad spend.

You could even go so far as to create a custom variable for ads such as ‘creative=banner1′ and pass those through to track ROI statistics on your creatives.

If you associate it instead with any campaign, adgroup, or ad, you will find a custom field within the applicable settings that allow you to track things statically within the system. For example, you can create a custom variable called ‘ad_type’ and associate it with ads. You then have a field available within your ad settings that will allow you to define an ad_type such as text or banner.

How do I take advantage of them?

When you create a custom variable within niceroi it is made available throughout the entire system for your use. You are able to get overview statistics for them, watch them come through in real time within the live view, get basic reports that contain ROI statistics for them, or even utilize them within custom reporting to get an even more advanced break down on them. In a future post we’ll go over why custom reporting is so powerful.

For custom variables that are associated with the tracker you even gain an access to a token that you can pass through to your landing pages. For example, you can take the custom variable that you created called ‘creative’ and gain access to a token called {creative}.

You can then place that token into your landing page destination url (such as http://yoursite.com/?creative={creative}) and have it passed through to your landing page whenever someone clicks on your tracking link. Doing this would enable you to dynamically customize your landing page towards the creative that the visitor saw before clicking on your ad!

How about an example?

This example shows a Publisher_ID being used within a custom report. The breakdown shows which carriers are coming from that specific publisher. You can easily get a high level overview of what makes a specific publishers traffic profitable for you, or alternatively, gain insight into what isn’t working. You can even combine different custom variables to break them down in the same manner.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The flexibility that these custom variables provide you with means that you able to shape the niceroi platform to be any type of analytics platform that you desire. Any type of data that you have access to you can pass through the system directly to your landing page while in the process also generating simple or complex ROI statistics and breakdowns on all of it.