I have a site with an affiliate scheme that is under-used for affiliates but has proved very useful for tracking adword sales - I send Adword traffic to an affiliate address example.com/?a=affiliate, and once there is a sale I can go into the affiliate program and if it’s an adword sale it will show me what search term was used when they clicked on my adword. This is incredibly helpful!
Should I be able to do that without that affilates? Should I be able to do it in Google Analytics - and not just for adwords but for natural listings clicks and traffic from other site’s regular backlinks to my site?
Don’t forget that the client could make the order on his second or third or consequent visit. Most tracking software will show you the source of the last visit only, and the original advertising channel that actually brought you this customer remains unknown.
You should record every visitor’s original source and associate it with orders.
You need a more advanced analytic tool that looks at multiple conversion points. Google Analytics has introduced this for paid search but it’s generally just something you find in enterprise analytics or specialized tools.
Sophisticated analytics gather the necessary information, whether it’s organic search or a tag on a tracked campaign, from the referring URL and parse it out appropriately.
So links into sites contain the anchor text in the url string, and search terms from search engines are also in the string, and javascript whether it’s GA or people’s own code can track these log these track these strings? A visitor clicks a link on another site to our site: why does the client then pass that string (anchor/search term) to the new site? Surely it only needs to request the url of the page it wants? Or is it that the client logs the string, doesn’t pass it, but GA/javascript can retrieve the anchor text from the client?
That question is probably all over the place… obviously I’m finding my way.
Google Analytics provide a tracking system with analytics known as funnels. You can extend funnels with custom tracking elements to bring in customer IDs, actual conversion amounts and other useful details. Once you have a funnel setup, all traffic sources will show performance through to it.
I’m using cubecart 4 with the Worldpay gateway and unfortunately I can’t get the gateway to send customers back to me… presumably if there was a single returned-to page, I could use that as a goal. Is that how most ecommerce sites would do it? - I suppose it depends if they’re sending them off-site to make payment.
I have set up an analytics goal for a brochure site with the successful thankyou.html page as the goal. Since I set it up, there has been one contact form completed and in analytics I can see that the visitor came through google organic, but I can’t see which keyword they used. There’s no ‘keyword’ option in the goals category, so going off to the traffic>keywords section it’s not displaying the successful keyword despite there being a column for that goal. Hopefully just a temporary gremlin. And while it might not be working right now, I can see how it’s meant to work.
How is that done? My affiliate program does this for mysite.com?a=site-replication which I use as the destination for adword clicks because it tracks by cookie and IP address, so I’m able to track customers no matter when they first visited. But I can use mysite.com?a=site-replication as my everyday domain name. Although I suppose I could forward mysite.com to the affiliate address but that seems odd.
So how can I do this cookie and IP tracking for all customer?
