I am an Amazon author, who has cunningly inserted a 1 pixel x 1 pixel image onto the sales page of his book. My intent is to track how many times that image is viewed, thus learning how many people are visiting said page.
So far, so good, but: how do I count the downloads of the image? I have spent all afternoon Googling this, but have been unable to find a way to do it in Wordpress or Google Analytics.
The image is stored in the "Media Library" of my site, which is hosted on WP Engine. I did investigate hosting the image on Flickr instead, but Flickr doesn't seem to like me hotlinking images. I am open to hosting the image somewhere else that will allow me to see how many times it is viewed.
If anybody can point me in the right direction, I'll be very grateful.
Thanks,
-Charlie.
Related
On my Wordpress site which is affiliating with Amazon associate, i have many native shopping ads for products, that normally displays the products pictures with their names and the prices.
Lately, i activated ublock origin on my browser, then i realized there is only a white space in place of the products, at first i thought it was only due to slow internet, then i said maybe it is the cache so i deleted the cache, but nothing changes .... it took me a while to realize that ublock is killing all my native shopping ads.
which means this was going on for a while and i never noticed. maybe that is why the low click through, even that i have a good number of visits!
without adblock, my site look like this:
enter image description here
after adblock, it looks like this:
enter image description here
how can i fix this? is there any workaround it?
I searched in google and i found about asking visitors to disable adblock. that won't do, because it makes them suspicious of the site and usually just leave it.
I know i can put a picture of the products then write information on it with affiliate text link, but that won't give me the same design and usability as amazon's native shopping ads.
So, is there any way that i can make my amazon native shopping ads visible even with adblocking activated? some WordPress plugin or something?
Your help is highly appreciated, I really need this.
Thank you.
No, there isn't an easy way to do this. Those are ads and users with adblockers want ads blocked.
You can try building your own system that delivers the ads and hope that adblockers do not adjust their filters, but that'll probably mean playing whack-a-mole: you change things, they adapt, you change them again, they adapt again.
I've got a site that has multiple share buttons on entries in a WordPress site.
We designed this so there are no individual entries to view, they're Podcasts and videos. The listing page has a minimum of 10 entries, each with share buttons.
Currently the share links and titles are working correctly. But the page is not recognizing the og:image, and instead is picking up the default logo for the site itself.
I read another post on Stack Overflow that said it might be an issue for LinkedIn if the image is utilizing SSL for the link. But I just find that hard to believe.
The other issue I'm struggling with, the docs say once an image is scraped it stays cached for approximately 7 days.
I had an issue with FaceBook and there's a debugger that allows you to rescrape the page which let's me verify my changes worked.
My two questions are, is there something other than the og:image i should be specifying? since I can't specify it per post, it's in the head of the page itself, i would think it would pick that up. No?
Second, is there a way a developer can re-check after the meta info has been changed to see if the changes worked, without having to wait the TTL on the cache?
try this:
url/link?blah=1
url/link?blah=2
url/link?blah=3
to get around the cache.
This should trick it into thinking its a new page each time.
Can i get a link to test?
Anthony Walz posted the correct answer. Through email he also helped another problem i had which corrected a new issue i didn't realize I had until i looked.
my LinkedIn shares were not picking up the show title, they were picking up the page description instead (i have several podcasts showing on one page, we don't use individual post pages, they all play from the listing.)
he pointed me to the developer docs on formatting sharing links
Which gives a real world example - here:
https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://developer.linkedin.com&title=LinkedIn%20Developer%20Network
&summary=My%20favorite%20developer%20program&source=LinkedIn
Thanks a ton for assist Anthony!
We've set up a new mini-site with extensive social sharing, including LinkedIn. Lots of OpenGraph tagging, the works. We have chosen specific images to be shown when sharing by using the og:image meta property.
The images work fine on Facebook and Pinterest, but are not working properly on LinkedIn. Here's the OG image tagging:
<meta property="og:image" content="https://img.mshanken.com/d/wso/Articles/2016/ST_TheBreakers070516_1600.jpg">
But if you click the LinkedIn icon we have set up at the bottom of our page, you end up on a share page that looks like this, which does NOT show the image:
Weirder still, if you inspect that share preview, the image IS in the source code:
<div class="image-thumbs-container">
<img src="https://media.licdn.com/media-proxy/ext?w=180&h=110&f=c&hash=q0uvWygJS2HJrhZZ2qZGdYu2Tig%3D&ora=1%2CaFBCTXdkRmpGL2lvQUFBPQ%2CxAVta5g-0R6jnhxUzw8p4aCKqEH-50hKCoaTFXP-RFTovozTPCKqZsXfeLS-xzl5HHRU4kZnLrT9AnPhFZO5KoyAfNpxi4m_ZMc" width="130" alt="Preview of the share image" data-orig-url="https://img.mshanken.com/d/wso/Articles/2016/ST_TheBreakers070516_1600.jpg" data-width="" data-height="" data-size="" data-position="1" class="active">
</div>
What do we need to do to get that image showing up on LinkedIn shares?
I was having the same issue last night. Spent hours researching solutions. Finally I contacted LinkedIn about this issue and they responded right away. Their development team has implemented a new tool called "Post Inspector", which allows you to optimize content sharing. Literally, in just minutes this worked.
All you have to do is type in your URL and they do all the busy work i.e. verifying correct code of properties such as image, author, title, description, publication date etc. Not only do they verify, they also tell you what to include and what is missing.
Here is the website to use Post Inspector:
https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/
Couple of things it could be:
The dimensions 1600x900 and size of 220kb are within LinkedIn's requirements. However, your aspect is 16:9 instead of 4:1 / 1:4.
Max file size: 1 MB
Minimum image dimensions: 80 x 150 pixels
Recommended aspect ratio: 4:1 or 1:4
Making Your Website Shareable on LinkedIn
Your image URI is https, it could be they are unable to retrieve your image. Have you tried with an http image?
Note: If the image meets the requirements, but it still does not
appear in updates on LinkedIn, your website may be blocking us from
pulling the image or the image may be located on a protected directory
or website.
Making Your Website Shareable on LinkedIn
Was the image change from the first time LinkedIn crawled your page for the image? They do cache for ~7 days.
The first time that LinkedIn's crawlers visit a webpage when asked to
share content via a URL, the data it finds (Open Graph values or our
own analysis) will be cached for a period of approximately 7 days.
This means that if you subsequently change the article's description,
upload a new image, fix a typo in the title, etc., you will not see
the change represented during any subsequent attempts to share the
page until the cache has expired and the crawler is forced to revisit
the page to retrieve fresh content.
Shared Content Caching
Chiming in from the future - I faced this issue today as our site update wasn't displaying the proper image. In my case the solution was simple: try posting the link like so: https://url.com/?jhskjsh and it forced linked in to fetch the meta tags again which then displayed my image, as opposed to the grey square it previously had.
We have set up several of our websites on Apple News now. For half of our sites (built on one platform), images are displayed in the Article List view 95% of the time. The other half of our sites display an image in the Article List 0% of the time.
However, images are reliably displayed on the Article View page.
The images used are almost certainly NOT the one provided in the RSS feed in the media thumbnail tag; they are almost certainly being scraped from the article itself. Images are set properly in the OG tags.
This behaviour is consistent between iPads and iPhones.
Any ideas would be welcome.
I can think of a couple of things, this may or may not constituent a complete answer, but its some ideas.
Self host the images on a webserver that tracks all requests (nginx - awstats - etc)
Wrap the images or the urls in a tracking url script (can even be monetized) where you submit an image url and receive one in return (called something like In-Image Advertising, or using a link tracker/redirector)
embed a javascript into the theme or what-have-you into this news thing that tracks each image being loaded, ( OR
The rest of these kinds of ideas really very greatly depends on your amount of control, and skills.
Hope I helped you with some good ideas. Willing to help more.
I've recently encountered a problem with OpenX. I can no longer choose zones to link to my banners. The zones simply won't show up. But this seems to only occur when I have uploaded a local image.
I have chosen the zones for each campaign properly, but despite that, the zones won't show up under the banners for the most recent advertiser accounts that I have created.
Strangely enough, I tested one recent advertiser account by choosing to create a banner with an external html url. The zones showed up fine. When I removed the external html url and uploaded a local image, the zones disappeared again.
I thought it might be an image permissions problem, but all of the images for all campaigns are in the same folder, and I've compared all images. They all have the same permissions.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The image dimensions probably do not fit the dimensions of the zone.
You can set the zone dimensions to "*" if you to push banners of different sizes in one zone.
When you used an HTML/JS banner OpenX has no way of finding the dimensions of that banner so it allows you to assign it to any zone that is linked to the banners campaign.