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.
Note
For more information about the SMIL 2.0
Specification, W3C Recommendation, see the W3C Web site.
Note