Logging advertising data
Applies To: Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2
If you want to log data about the advertisements you stream, the best way to gather the data is by using playlists to reference your content.
Because playlists in Windows Media Services are Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents, each element in a playlist supports attributes. Each piece of content in a playlist is a separate media element, so you can differentiate advertising content from other media elements easily by using the role attribute. When a specific media element is selected in either the Playlist Editor or on the Source tab, you can select its role attribute and then specify the value as Advertisement. When you specify a value for the role attribute, Windows Media Services will provide advertising-specific statistics to the administrative interfaces. These statistics can help you keep track of the number of advertisements streamed from a server or publishing point.
You can use the WMS Client Logging plug-in to create log files that you can analyze. The log files that are created by the plug-in are simple comma-delimited text files in which data is grouped into different fields. To extract useful information from the log file, you must determine a method to use to analyze the data. One useful method is to group items by the value of their cs-media-role field, which is the field that reflects the value you specified for the role attribute. You can summarize the data to find out information about a particular advertisement, such as:
The number of users that played the entire advertisement.
The number of users that disconnected from the stream during the advertisement.
The average amount of time users played the advertisement.
The number of users that received the advertisement.
The content that was requested before and after the advertisement played.
This information can help you determine which advertisements are most effective, bill clients, and make decisions about future advertising content.