Hi
When you say “hits”, do you mean clicks? If you mean clicks, our plugin does not track clicks. Tracking clicks is something you can do using Google Analytics and click events.
Regarding impressions, do you have ad impressions count enabled for Admins? If not, then browsing while you are logged in will not generate impressions.
Another thing that might be affecting ad impression counts is the bug you have in your ‘buddypress’ plugin. If you go here http://www.ethanolnetworks.com/members/mattwerzyn/ you will see the following error:
Warning: strstr() [function.strstr]: Empty delimiter in /home/wp_xxxxxxxxx/ethanolnetworks.com/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/bp-core-filters.php on line 641
This could also affect our plugin as well as other aspects of your site.
Eric
When in the admin backend of the site and looking at the Ads plugin under all ads it shows a column for Hits in between Date and Start date. I had assumed that this was counting the number of clicks that an ad received.
I do have ad impression count enable for admins. I noticed the “bug” that you had mentioned just this week and the problem with the impressions count has been going on much longer so I do not believe this is the issue.
Hi
When in the admin backend of the site and looking at the Ads plugin under all ads it shows a column for Hits in between Date and Start date.
This must be added by some other plugin. It’s not added by ours.
Eric
Eric,
I will respond in the forum and directly via email as well, but wanted to be able to send you a screen view of what I was seeing on the “All Ads” administration page of your DR Ads plugin. I’m really not concerned as much with the Hits as I am with the Impression count not being correct, especially with it being so far off. Please see the screen shot attachment in my email.
The “bug” that I was referring to was the one that you had mentioned and linked to in your reply to my original post. I have attached it below. This Warning for an Empty Delimiter issue is new but the impressions counter issue was happening previous to this.
Eric wrote: Another thing that might be affecting ad impression counts is the bug you have in your ‘buddypress’ plugin. If you go here http://www.ethanolnetworks.com/members/mattwerzyn/ you will see the following error:
Warning: strstr() [function.strstr]: Empty delimiter in /home/wp_xxxxxxxxx/ethanolnetworks.com/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/bp-core-filters.php on line 641
Thanks,
Tom
Hi
Like I said, “Hits” is not something that this plugin tracks. I don’t know why there’s a “Hits” column or how it got there. Probably some other plugin you have installed has added that blindly to all custom post types management pages.
Regarding impression counts, well, I’m not sure why that’s happening. Do you have a caching plugin installed? Maybe your webhost Dreamhost is doing some heavy caching on their end causing the value to not be updated. Or maybe Memcache is active and that would definitely cause impressions to be off.
Eric
Hi Eric,
No caching plugin installed on the site. Where would I check to see if Memcache would be active?
Thanks,
Tom
You’ll need to ask your host (DreamHost) if they are doing any caching of your site from their end.
Hi Eric,
Spoke with DreamHost they do use server side caching. They believe that there may be a way to handle this and I’m waiting to hear back from them.
Thanks,
Tom
ethanoltom – You’re on DreamPress, which comes with Varnish (doesn’t cache wp-admin) and Memcached (object caching, kinda caches wp-admin).
datafeedr – How are the ads injected? if impressions are tracked by a JS script, they should be fine, but if it’s plain old PHP, then it may be stuck on cached data.
That said, Varnish isn’t currently caching properly on ethanolnetworks.com for a couple reasons. WordFence is primarily why. BuddyPress is the other main reason.
But did you know that WORDFENCE has a cache? Try turning that off.
Thanks Ipstenu-DH! Yes, there is a JS version.
@ethanoltom – We’ve outlined how to enable JS displaying of ads here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3v_1vtnh9c
Basically you need to add return_javascript=1 to your shortcode or PHP code.
Thanks Ipstenu/Eric.
May be making some headway. I added the return_javascript=1 and most of the time it is registering the impressions, but not always. It did cause a secondary issue though. I had all of the ads assigned to a group, that group was assigned to a specific text widget location (First Sidebar, Second Sidebar, Header, etc.) and set to rotate randomly within that group. This worked prior to adding the return_javascript=1 code. Since adding the new code all ads that I have created, even those not assigned to any group, are rotating randomly in all group locations.
Thanks,
Tom
Just removed the new code and ads are back to correctly rotating randomly in only their designated Group/Widget area. But they are back to the original problem of getting no impression count again now.
Thanks,
Tom
Eric,
Dreamhost suggested that I speak with the developer of the plugin to see if there was anything that could be changed to work around this issue. Here is the response below.
You’ll want to speak with the plugin developer or support
team further about this as there is caching in place on the DreamPress
servers that the plugin team may be able to configure the plugin to avoid
caching.
If the plugin’s running on JS, it’s going to be fine with DreamPress, but again, Varnish, the thing you’re clashing with, isn’t working on your account. I’m 100% certain the Varnish cache isn’t the issue just yet.
Ethan, can you try disabling the cache that comes with WordFence?
