Yesterday, I launched a PPC campaign for one of my services and added some tracking on my end.
As a developer I am supposed to be lazy so I decided to set up a regular cron job that will send me stats every few days.
The idea
I set up a cron job to call a given website every Monday, Wednesday & Friday at 8:30AM.
The output from that link needed to be sent to an email address.
The idea is to call a website which will generate some stats and those stats need to be emailed.
This is a huge time saving because I don't have to login anywhere and the stats are conveniently delivered to my email address.
How I did it
Log into linux server or you can use your control panel's interface to set it.
[code]
crontab -e
[/code]
Add a cron job task
[code]
# Mon, Wed, Fri at 8:30am
30 08 * * 1,3,5 lynx --source 'http://example.com/?orbisius_gen_stats=1' 2>&1 | mail -a "Content-type: text/html" -s "CPC Report" 'reports@example.com'
[/code]
2>&1 is necessary so the output gets redirected from STDERR to STDOUT.
-s "CPC Report" <== this is the subject line.
If the app doesn't return the stats in HTML you can remove the following params:
-a "Content-type: text/html"
'reports@example.com' <== This is the recipient. Make sure you use your email address ;)
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