Example of G click tracking URL needed!

[Hanu]

I need an example of those click tracking redirect URLs that G sometimes put into the serps for quality assurance. I saw them this morning but when you need them they are gone! So if someone stumbles upon one, could they possibly post it here?

[Jack_Hughes]

If you mean you've seen them being used by google to send traffic to your site then you should be able to find the info you need in your web log.

[Hanu]

Cannot find them in my logs. I checked someone's proxy logs and found these (examplified)

[google.de ]

but I think they are caused by the toolbar. Anyone?

Edit: examplify url

[Dabu The Dragon]

Hanu, are you talking about the absolute URL from google to your placement?

[mcavic]

It's like this:

[google.com...]

I've never seen these on Google before... They used to use a clever javascript tracking method.

[Hanu]

OK, so to summarize things that have been brought up so far:

G is using two different ways of tracking simultaneously: JS and 302s. The JS method works as usual: search result links have attribute onmousedown="clk()" and function clk() fetches an image. For the 302 method we made these observations:

1) The tracking page is /url

2) Parameter q holds the real url

3) Parameter sa seems to encode the source. Possible values are T as in Toolbar and U as in User(Agent). If sa is T it is followed by parameters cd, ct, q and ei. If sa is U, it is followed by start, q and e.

4) Parameters cd and start seems to encode the position of the result. First match gets 1, second 2 and so on.

5) Parameter e seems to identify a session/user combination. Parameter e stays the same for subsequent searches. Parameter ei has two parts: the first part is different for each search. The second part (the righmost 12 characters) stays the same.

6) Parameter ct is unknown. ct=res could mean "click track results" but that's even more hypothetical than the other observations.

[mcavic]

Sounds good to me, at least when sa=U.

The e parameter does stick across browser sessions, but I wonder why it's only only 4 digits? Also, I deleted my Google cookie, and the tracking urls went away.