Basically, I want to use the Facebook Ads Manager Tool to estimate the number of users targeted by a particular set of targeting parameters. I know there is a published API available, but it is only usable if you are on their advertising application "whitelist." I am sure what I am asking is possible. Plus, it would be interesting to learn more about scraping.
Facebook's Ads Manager Tool is basically an AJAX UI for their ads API. In the process of creating a campaign, you can specify targeting parameters, and the page will dynamically report the number of users targeted as you modify the parameters. From what I've read on the web and here on stackOverflow, it is possible to use Firebug or a similar tool to pick apart what requests are being made by the page and to where, then mimicking these calls to get the information you want.
I'm having trouble interpreting the panels of Firebug. I think the URI I'm trying to send a request to is www.facebook.com/ajax/inventory_estimator.php, though I'm not sure how to form a call.
So, if I want to write a script or program that takes a list of words to use as keywords and returns the estimated number of users for each keyword, how could I do it?
Link to Facebook's Ads Manager Tool, Campaign Creation Page:
http://www.facebook.com/ads/create
yes using an extension like firebug to examine the HTTP requests is a good way to do this.
The Net tab is the one you want (last one).
Have you tried irobotsoft webscraper? It has a good ajax support.
Check their forum here: http://irobotsoft.org/bb/YaBB.pl
Related
For a given Google API, is there any way to dynamically check usage against any of the current limits for that API?
For example, this page https://developers.google.com/classroom/limits?hl=en shows that I can query the Classrooms API 4,000,000 times per client per day. At midday, without going to the API Console, how could I know that I've already hit 3 million queries?
I'm hoping that there's a billing or usage API that covers this, but can't see it.
Note: I'm not having any issue right now with a specific call, just anticipating that my usage will scale up significantly in the next few months, so am looking for a solution for monitoring rather than advice on not hitting the limits at all. My specific use-case is for Google Classrooms, but reading wider around this I can't see a general solution either.
Answer:
No, dynamically you can't retrieve this information.
Feature Request:
You can however let Google know that this is a feature that is important for the Google Workspace APIs to have, and that you would like to request they implement it.
The page to file a Feature Request for the Google Classroom API is here, as there is no specific component for Google Workspace APIs in general I would suggest filing it here instead.
You can use Google's Cloud Monitoring API to achieve this. This is the documentation page for APIs-
https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/v3
This is the documentation page for concerned metrics-
https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/metrics_gcp#serviceruntime/quota/allocation/usage
https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/metrics_gcp#serviceruntime/quota/exceeded
https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/metrics_gcp#serviceruntime/quota/limit
I have about 1 million URI logs of user activity on my network, I want to know how many of those 1 million are for Facebook, how many are for Twitter, and so on..
It's easy to link URIs like cdn.xyz.twitter.com , platform.twitter.com to Twitter
However, the problem I'm facing is that I'm not able to link no more than 40% of the URLs captured to real websites, a URL like xys.1234.com can be something in facebook for example, but there isn't a link between that URL and facebook.com domain, thus will just be listed as a stand-alone website, which is wrong (or not what I want).
Also, all API calls won’t also be easily linked to their domains because some websites are maybe using amazon web services and that's what is being logged.
And Many of the URIs are generated from ad services, I want to know where this ad is generated from ( on what website or mobile application did the user click on the ad? ).
Snapshots of URIs so you would understand the whole picture.
https://imgur.com/a/2Ocqi
https://imgur.com/a/bmhNv
So you're trying to match up outgoing requests? How do you expect to know that a user who accessed xyz.1234.com did it through Facebook rather than independently by typing the URL into the address bar? Or by clicking a link from some other page? Your log doesn't contain information that tells you which URLs are linked from which page. Without another source of information, you can't be sure.
You could examine the requests for multiple users and infer relationships. That is, if you notice that all (or a majority of) requests to xyz.1234.com occur after a Facebook request, you can infer that the request occurred as a result of a click on a Facebook page. Doing so will require some interesting pattern matching. How well it works will depend on how much data you have to work with, how well you write the pattern matching, and how much time you're willing to let the algorithm run.
There's no simple answer, though. If you don't have data that explicitly says, "this request was made by clicking on a link from Twitter," then you have to either get another source of information or you have to write code that will infer that information.
I am looking to test different traffic patterns within Google Analytics (Direct traffic abnormally high). I was curious if anyone knows how to create an event that fires when source =wildcard To make this event more difficult, this would be set up within Google Tag Manager using Universal Analytics.
I see the 6 event tags but none of them sounds like it would perform my need?
Thanks
Google Tag Manager is not a tracking tool and knows nothing about the traffic source, so no preconfigured macro could be used in a rule to fire tags depending on source.
If you use "classic" asynchronous analytics you can set up a macro that reads the _utmz-cookie and checks in a rule if it contains a source string ("direct","cpc" etc.).
However Universal Analytics determines the traffic source on the server and does not store it clientside, so with UA this would not work.
A few traffic sources are easily recognizable on the respective landing page:
If no referrer is present it's a direct visit/bookmark
if there are campaign (utm) parameters in the url you can use those
if there is a gclid parameter in the url you know it google/cpc
if the referrer is a google domain with a country tld and the parameter "q" is present (will be empty with encrypted search but should still be there) it's an organic google search
if the referrer is a bing domain with the parameter q present it's an organic bing search (and similar for other search engines)
However this will only work on landing pages. You need to write you own cookie to store the source for subsequent pages.
You can refine this approach to give rather similar results to Google Analytics but it will never match perfectly.
One of the most common reasons for abnormal high direct traffic is that no campaign parameters are present in paid traffic, either because you forgot to enable autotagging in your adwords campaigns or because you have redirects that strip out campaign parameters (so paid traffic is lumped together with direct). The above approach would not help you to discover this so I suggest you check this manually first before you do anything else.
My app, in one of its parts, should reproduce the same behaviour as a web page, where you can find a section with a table of Twitter posts, I guess they are a user's timeline. I took a look at Twitter api's and I found a call which could return it, but, If I got it right, you are supposed to be authenticated with that user credentials. Is there a way to achieve it without being that user (thus without using that user's credentials)? If not we have to assume that web plugins have more flexibility than queries which return xml, or json? Which kind of approach fits best, considering the app needs to support iOS from 4.3 to 6.x? Does Twitter+Oauth provide more flexibility than direct Twitter api calls?
Hm, if you are looking to just display user's feed you can do it as simple as:
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=reMakeIn&count=200
Where you change the screen_name to the desired user that you want to show the feeds for.
No need what so ever to use authentication for this.
Not sure if this is what you want to achieve, but I use this approach to show random user's tweet feed.
When you go to edit your favorite music or movies on Facebook, you will notice an autocomplete suggest list that is basically a list of "everything" (brand names, music artists, movies, etc.) How can someone consume that list in their own code? Is it part of the Facebook API?
They wrap some of the functionality in their FBML fields, but their developer wiki shows how they do what they do. If you want to consume their data though, you're going to have to play with an HTTP proxy and figure out what parameters to send to their server. There are also a couple parameters that seem to be session based, so I don't know how well you're going to be able to integrate this into your own application.
This was working for awhile, but now they require the session cookie, so we'll have to hope they add support for this to the graph api, unless you want to fight w/ the proxy.