I have been spending money advertising with paid search engines like goto.com. I would like to be able to monitor which pages are being viewed by the visitors from these search engines (not just the page they were linked to, but all the pages they viewed). I want to be able to see if any of these click-thrus are leading to sales. What do you suggest?
1) When a referral comes in from one of these search engines, write a cookie to the user's browser. You'll need to figure out how to write a different cookie for each referring link -- for example, you might want to assign an ID and a referring partner ID or something like that. It would help if you could write this to a database because it would help you generate unique ID's. Beware of sites that have cookies turned off.
2) When someone places an order, check this cookie on their browser. You'll then be able to see where the lead came from.
Thanks for the responses. I have a question about one of the suggestions made.
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1) When a referral comes in from one of these search engines, write a cookie to the user's browser. You'll need to figure out how to write a different cookie for each referring link -- for example, you might want to assign an ID and a referring partner ID or something like that. It would help if you could write this to a database because it would help you generate unique ID's. Beware of sites that have cookies turned off.
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How do I do this? How do I write a cookie. I'm afraid I don't have any experience in this. Are there some resources someone could point me to that could help me understand this process. Or better, yet, does someone want to explain it to me.
Adam, http://www.hitbox.com/ tracks your vistors throughout your site and also let's you know where they came from. The only downside is that you'll have to manually add the code for each page. They also claim that their free service isn't very effective for sites >100 pages. Their pay service is also invisble to the visitor. You won't be able to tell which order came from which lead.
I kind of dismissed looking at hitbox.com at first, but after being pointed that way twice, I took a look, and its very impressive. I'm going to take a closer look and see if it serves my purposes and if its worth the cost or the hitbox button (for the free version) on my site.
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