Tracking externally provided PPC links

for a publisher

[davec]

Hi All

We have recently changed PPC providers (we are a publisher, with a portfolio of about 70 sites) across all our sites. Unfortunately the new provider doesn't provide any decent statistics, all we get is total searches, clicks and revenue a day in arrears.

I want to track the external links using our own system so I can get a real-time idea of what sites, pages etc people are clicking through from.

Does anyone know of any tracking software that is available for doing this? I've done a fair amount of research but most seem to want you to manually add the URL's to be tracked (which we can't do as the URL's are dynamically generated by a third party), or are targetted towards advertisers rather than publishers.

I'm sure there are trackers out there that we can wrap the url's in, similar to the following format:

<a href="http://www.ourtrackingdomain.com/clicktrack.php?http://www.ppcproviderlink.com/d/d/?variable=long_string_of_random_characters_eo19r%2DmI7oKcaOP9mN0&site=www.advertiser.com">link</a>

I'd like to track the following information if possible:

1) Timestamp
2) IP address
3) Referring URL (from one of our sites)
4) Keyword searched on

Ideally using php, or even perl. So does anyone know of such a script? I've seen another publisher wrapping their PPC from the same provider with a track.php script so I presume it's possible, but I didn't receive a response when I emailed them.

Many Thanks
d

<edit typos>

[bostonscott]

Hi D,

You should be able to add tracking code dynamically to your URLs. Most hosted ROI tracking tools (like keywordmax for example), ask you to add the same tracking code to the end of each URL:

www.yoursite.com/page.html?engine=xkeyword=x=.25

Because they add a snippet of java code to each page on your site that interacts with that code, they can give you the data you asked for (timestamp, IP address, etc).

I have yet to find a perfect hosted ROI tracking tool, but if your keywords and ads are being supplied dynamically, there is no reason tracking code can't be added dynamically that I can think of (with will there is a way).

[davec]

Thanks for the reply. I will look into some hosted solutions. Ideally I'd like something that can sit on our server, but I'm open to any ideas at the moment.

Cheers
D

[eWhisper]

For 3rd party service, whosclickingwho can send you an excel sheet with a LOT of info about your clicks (timestamp, IP, referral string (full string, including AdSense site clicked from) etc).

You can then just make a script to take the csv info and output exactly what you're looking for into another format.

If your going to develop it inhouse, you might first want to learn about dynamic KW insertion for your ads so that you can pull KWs from your referral logs:
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