Track Impressions On Your PhpBay Site

Sites built using software like phpBay or BANS use the RSS feed from eBay to display listings on your site. If you have noticed, when you run reports in your EPN account, it will show "0" impressions however you may have 100 clicks, 20 bids and 10 winning bids in your report.

Many have wondered how that can be possible since there were "no impressions". The reason behind this is simple, EPN does not track your impressions if you are using the RSS feed.

In my opinion, there is no need to track impressions on these sites. Your hosting webstats program or Google Analytics account will tell you how many visitors you had, what pages were loaded, etc.

However, there are some stat freaks (not making fun, I used to be one) out there who want to be able to track impressions in their EPN account.

There are a few ways you can do this. One is to install a banner from the tools in your EPN account. This is the easiest method, but sometimes those banners clash with the site and you may not want to see them on there.

Another way is to login to your EPN account and go to the Link Generator. Then create any type of a link and add your Campaign ID and Custom ID (if you want to use this). Now create the link.

After you have done this, you will be given a set of four options for the link. Choose Impressions and it will give you the code to place somewhere in your template. Most like to put it in the footer.

Visitors will not see the link, yet you will still be able to track impressions.

It is up to you whether or not you feel it is necessary to track impressions on your site. Bottom line, I don't do it anymore. I can pretty well tell all I need to know from my stats programs.

If anyone has an easier way, please feel free to leave a comment and I'll be glad to edit this post and give you the credit. These are just the methods I'm familiar with.