Better Tracking Ability?

[TEMPLE3188]

Hi peeps,

Haven't been around for a while, just decided to get back in this game and see what I can get out of it, before I left I asked freebie networks for the possibility of better tracking and I am sad to see there's been nothing done on it, or so it seems.

Tracking?

You have a website advertising FreebieJeebies yes? Wouldn't you like to know exactly where your visitor came from? What they were looking for? What link/graphic did they click to sign up from? What webpage of your website did they sign up from? Did the visitor complete an offer? Which one?

All that is needed is one simple parameter for us to pass to the freebie networks, think of the possibilities. You have been doing some SEO work for "free iphone", you start to get some traffic, you realize that people are also finding your website searching "get a free iphone", if we could track we might be able to find that 50% of all traffic from the keyword "get a free iphone" converts whereas only 20% of "free iphone" traffic converts.

* The above statistics are for explanation purposes only

See what I mean? If we found what keywords/phrases converted better we could target those, they will be less competitive. Not only tracking where and how someone gets to your freebie website, but also how did they flow to the signup process, what pages/links/graphics proved most impressive for increasing the conversion ratio?

We can increase the traffic to our websites all we like, but the truth of the matter is without tracking we can all only assume what's working.

Some of us prefer buying traffic in comparison to spending countless hours doing SEO, people paying for traffic could track as well as people who track search engine traffic, at the minute we have no way of telling if someone from a paid or free source of traffic signed up and converted and whether they clicked a specific image or text link to sign up.

Scenario

Users arrives from Google after searching "free iphone", you find this user clicks the first text link in the paragraph and signs up, only 10% of these complete an offer because they didn't read too much into how it worked on your website, so they leave the freebie website and never look back.

Users arrives from Google after searching "free iphone". You find that when you removed the first text link and make the user read a little more about how it's possible, you then find that your conversion rate now increases by 5% to 15%.

Can anyone else see how blind we're flying, if we could have 1 parameter to pass to a freebie website we could track everything, squeeze the most out of our traffic and increase conversions by refining.


What do you guys think?

[rob110492]

This would be VERY useful! i would use it alot!

But i doubt they will do it...

[chapperzUK]

1) Wouldn't you like to know exactly where your visitor came from? Use Google Analytics
2) What they were looking for? I don't have mind reading technology so this will be impossible to find out unless you ask them, and you know their email address if they sign up
3) What link/graphic did they click to sign up from? I'm guessing that would be hard to track.
4) What webpage of your website did they sign up from? Did the visitor complete an offer? Which one? You can find this out from the "My Status" page.

[coffeecoffe]

All of these things can be done with a simple WordPress site and Google Analytics.

Check out the ‘Redirection’ plugin and setup a different redirect link for each graphic. Each redirect has its own hit counter in the backend admin pages.

[chigley]

Originally Posted by coffeecoffe

All of these things can be done with a simple WordPress site and Google Analytics.

Check out the ‘Redirection’ plugin and setup a different redirect link for each graphic. Each redirect has its own hit counter in the backend admin pages.

Yes, but that wouldn't tell you which of those different graphics got a better signup to click, or green to signup, ratio. I think that's what the OP is getting at...

[kudos]

@TEMPLE3188 - I haven't forgotten your request mate! Its on my list of considerations after the initial launch.

[Garyl2k]

This is possible but the only way I can see this working is by the freebie networking communicating back to your script that IP completed offer and your database of visitors would then be tracked down to what keyword and country etc.

People that sold their products on clickbank has something like this, helped their affiliates keep track of all their keyword conversions and tracking.

[TEMPLE3188]

Originally Posted by kudos

@TEMPLE3188 - I haven't forgotten your request mate! Its on my list of considerations after the initial launch.

Cheers Lee,

I think a lot of people are struggling to understand what I mean, there is no communication back and forward needed, all we need is to be able to pass 1 parameter and have our value appear on the other end.

The examples I gave above are just the start of what's capable with it, some people mentioned tracking with Google as I was expecting, but you can't track who's converting on the freebie network end with Google.

It would also be incredibly simple i.e.

http://myfreebielink/ref44?track=signup_button_01
http://myfreebielink/ref44?track=sidebar_graphic_01

The details I gave above in the OP would be more complex, I would be tracking everything about where they came from, and if from Google find out what their query was, track what they done, where they left, if they converted etc. building a database table with the details and passing a unique identifier to track if that referral converted, that way when a conversion appears and I have a unique identifier such as "001" attached to them to track them, I go back to my database and check everything signup "001" did so I can target them better and improve conversions.


Looking forward to the re-design too Lee!
If Kudos has this feature I will jump on it lol!

Temple

[kudos]

Yea its dead simple to implement. The hard bit is the interface - i.e. how to display the stats to the end user, and how to explain how it works etc.

I haven't started on it yet but its definitely on my list. Infact there is a tab for it in the members area in the new design, just no content yet.

[williamblah]

I would love a better tracking system. It could simply be done with sending multiple parameters in the URLs. When the data is extracted to the excel file, you can use scripts within excel to strip out various strings of text from a larger string, and thus build an easily readable table with all of the parameters set out neatly.

[xploit]

Google Analytics Solution:

You can use Google Analytics to track clicks on links that lead away from your site. Because links that lead away from your site are not automatically tracked, you will need to manually tag all outbound links you want to track. To do this, you'll add some JavaScript customizations to your page and to the links you want to track.

1. Set up Event Tracking in your Analytics Tracking code.
This is a simple matter of adding the following line to the tracking code for your pages after the page tracking object is set up:
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker('UA-XXXXX-X');
pageTracker._trackPageview();
2. Add a JavaScript method in the head of your document to delay the outbound click by a fraction of a second.
This delay will hardly be noticeable by the user, but it will provide the browser more time load the tracking code. Without this method, it's possible that a user can click on the outbound link before the tracking code loads, in which case the event will not be recorded. Here's what the JavaScript code in the <head> section should look like (assuming you will use your own tracking code ID):

<script type="text/javascript">
function recordOutboundLink(link, category, action) {
try {
var pageTracker=_gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-X");
pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action);
setTimeout('document.location = "' + link.href + '"', 100)
}catch(err){}
}
</script>
3. Update your outbound links to call the new function without first following the link. For example, to log every click on a particular link to Example Web Page, you would use the _trackEvent() method in the link's <a> tag:

<a href="http://www.example.com" onClick="recordOutboundLink(this, 'Outbound Links', 'example.com');return false;">
The example above uses the category label Outbound Links. This is a useful way to categorize all outbound links in the Event Tracking reports. It sets the specific name of the website as the second parameter in the call. With this structure in place, you could then see Outbound Links as one of the event categories and drill down to see which particular outbound links are the most popular. Be sure to use return false for the onClick handler, because without that statement the browser will follow the link before the recordOutboundLink method has a chance to execute.

Hope this helps

[TEMPLE3188]

Originally Posted by xploit

Google Analytics Solution:


Hope this helps

Yes, but Google can only tell us how many times people exited from a specific link with this code, they can't tell us whos converting on the freebie site end

[buckers582]

How about a graph showing you the ups and downs that turns your sign ups into a line graph split into 3 colours for each status that go up and down depending on how many sign ups you get each day.
This would make tracking how well a change in your website is effecting your results or a change in advertising?