Idiotic Newbie Question: How do I track links from paid advertising?

[SulkyGirl]

Sorry. New to the whole paid advertising thing. How can I track the people who come in from the ads? If my URL is www.fakeurl.com, do I add something onto the end or something? Thank you for your dumbed-down help!

[LifeinAsia]

Yep. For example, www.fakeurl.com/landingpage.asp?PaidID=1

You would setup landingpage.asp to log the link as coming from whatever site has 1 as the PaidID.

[kichus]

Hmmm... as the above posts says.... Adding the Query String to the Landing page URLs and the Funnel pages URls is the best way to track the Visits and the Conversions...

Depending on the tool you are using for Web Analytics, the methods may vary.

There are easy stt ups for tracking your Adwords using Google Analytics for example...

do a search for [track adwords in google analytics] in google and you will find the help guide from google analytics about this,..

[pmkpmk]

That fact that you care about tracking those links shows you're not a newbie anymore.

[SulkyGirl]

Hee! Yeah, I would consider myself a newbie to the technical side. I ran a fairly successful affiliate website for about three years, but it looked like absolute crap, because I only sorta-kinda-halfway taught myself HTML (via trial and error), never learned anything but what I absolutely NEEDED to know.

I'm getting more involved in actual webmastering right now, so there's a lot more to learn. :-)

Thank you for your help! I'm sure I'll be here quite a bit.

[Pianist718]

For each keyword you advertise for create a variable .... example ... www.yoursite.com/?GooglePPC=Keyword

Then when you use your analytics and you see a sale action (hopefully you assigned sale conversions to your reports) you can see the entry page. That page will be www.yoursite.com/?GooglePPC=Keyword

Good luck.

Igor M.

[edited by: Pianist718 at 3:48 pm (utc) on Nov. 22, 2006]