Organic vs paid visitor detection
- Thread starter dmarjos
- Start date
Give everything that comes from a paid click a campaign / tracking code. Every referral from an SE that does not have a code associated with it, is organic.
^^ works great for single page landers, but I've tried to do it in the context of a complete site. Tracking becomes nearly impossible once visitors click other links and start to browse your site.
I ended up sending my paid traffic to an island page (no outbound links) ... conversions are down but at least I can track paid vs. organic traffic. Once you know what sources convert, you can open them back up to your full site with some level of confidence that the traffic you're paying for is converting even after browsing a bit.
Tracking by IP works too ... that's a big hack to fit into 202 though.
I ended up sending my paid traffic to an island page (no outbound links) ... conversions are down but at least I can track paid vs. organic traffic. Once you know what sources convert, you can open them back up to your full site with some level of confidence that the traffic you're paying for is converting even after browsing a bit.
Tracking by IP works too ... that's a big hack to fit into 202 though.
Yep - and part of it depends on the analytics system and methodology it uses for attributing conversion - last click, first click, attributing to multiple sources so you have to dedupe etc. Enterprise level analytics (like Omniture) often give you the option to change the way these things are handled, cookie duration for different types of campaigns etc.
Complete side note, for those of you who haven't seen Omniture Discover - holy shit, it's bad ass. Especially once you understand all the crap you can do outside of the "standard implementation" that most companies do initially. Custom evars & events FTW.
This is a trivial thing to implement!
Prosper202 landing page tracking URLs have t202id parameter at the end. Just make sure that your Prosper JavaScript gets output only if that parameter is set. One extra line of code in PHP would implement this condition.
Your organic traffic will never trigger that JavaScript and your paid traffic will always have t202id set. Just be sure you do not let your tracking links to get exposed to indexing. Even if it happens set rel=canonical meta tag on every page to canonical URL without that parameter.
That is what I use and it works great.
Prosper202 landing page tracking URLs have t202id parameter at the end. Just make sure that your Prosper JavaScript gets output only if that parameter is set. One extra line of code in PHP would implement this condition.
Your organic traffic will never trigger that JavaScript and your paid traffic will always have t202id set. Just be sure you do not let your tracking links to get exposed to indexing. Even if it happens set rel=canonical meta tag on every page to canonical URL without that parameter.
That is what I use and it works great.
thanks for all the responses, but I have this question. When somebody in italy (for example) clicks on a sponsored link appearing in google.it, I see the visit as paid in Prosper202, and with the proper keywords recorded. If I make the same search, and click the same sponsored link, I just get a paid visit, with NO keywords attached. I even get a organic visit sometimes. I live in Argentina. How can this be possible, to have 2 or even 3 different results for the very same referer?
Parsing logs once per day via cron job to find paths through the site doesn't seem too difficult?
To track paid traffic, I do a simple php redirect on my server and then configure the ads to point to mylandingpage.com/index.php&ad=12. i will put the value of 'ad' parameter into a database and I know that ad12 means that a user clicked on advert_abc to access my page. Similarly you can use prosper/tracking202.
To track organic traffic I regexp domains without that 'ad' parameter.
To track organic traffic I regexp domains without that 'ad' parameter.
If you set up your ads properly in T202, you will get special links (#7 Get Links) from the ad to your site. That way, each click-through is recorded as an ad click and T202 will always know who came from an ad and what ad it was.
Organic traffic obviously won't come through any special link, no ad will get associated with the click, so you know it's organic.
The inner <script> tag is broken up (sc+rip+t) because some pop-up blockers and anti-malware progs get irritated by scripts injected by a document.write, so hopefully this makes it slip through. Alternatively, you can put the cookie test in the external file (landing.php) that gets called by the inner script, but doing it locally saves you one roundtrip to the server on all but the first page loads.
In your T202 stats, you will then see what page visitors arrived on, from what ad or org search query and whether they clicked through anywhere on your site and to what offer. You won't be able to tell which page they clicked out from and what other pages they visited in between, but that's good enough for me.
Organic traffic obviously won't come through any special link, no ad will get associated with the click, so you know it's organic.
I had the same problem and the solution is to set up your site as an advanced landing page, put the T202 javascript on every page, but make sure it fires only once on the first page the visitor arrives on. To do this, you test for the cookie that the JS sets:
Code:
<script type="text/javascript">
if (document.cookie.indexOf('tracking202subid=')<0) {
document.write('<sc'+'rip'+'t src="JS_code_you_get_from_#6_Get_LP_Code" type="text/javascript">'+'</s'+'crip'+'t>');
}
</script>In your T202 stats, you will then see what page visitors arrived on, from what ad or org search query and whether they clicked through anywhere on your site and to what offer. You won't be able to tell which page they clicked out from and what other pages they visited in between, but that's good enough for me.