Google Analytics Not Showing Banner Ad Generated Traffic

Analytics not showing redirects

[Copywriter39]

A client has a site that lists aircraft for sale from dealers all over the country. Many of these dealers have Google analytics installed. It shows when they come via the main site. But it doesn't show customers that arrive who have clicked on banner ads from the main site. Or that come via a listing in their digital publications. This is how the client described the problem to me, "The banner ads appear on our home page and sometimes on inside pages. Each is given a re-direct code that allows us to track response. We use this same formula with email blasts and with our digital publication. The problem
occurs when the customer uses google analytics they are not seeing any traffic from us even though our tracking systems says there are receiving plenty of movement."

How can they show these other mediums are benefitting them or get them to show up in the analytics.

[cgrantski]

Are the other sites being opened in new browser windows or tabs instead of the same window? And are the other customers using the referrer information to track the source of their traffic? That, by itself, will cause the referrer field to be empty for IE visitors, maybe other browsers too. Haven't checked recently because we haven't used referrer for a long time for this purpose. We put marking parameters into the destination URL itself, which is extremely accurate unless somebody decides to list the resulting URL on their site. Also we use "ondown" to add the parameters so that search engine spiders never see the extra arguments, meaning that the search engines will hopefully never list the modified URL.

Web analytics is hard!

[edited by: cgrantski at 1:14 pm (utc) on April 10, 2008]

[cgrantski]

("Web Analytics is Hard" is my new motto, in response to big-shots who are claiming that it's easy.)

[onlineleben]

Also we use "ondown" to add the parameters so that search engine spiders never see the extra arguments, meaning that the search engines will hopefully never list the modified URL.

Could you please elaborate on that? First time I read this.
Thx

[cgrantski]

It's because a search engine spider reads HTML and records (and later indexes) the href's destination URL. So you don't want the extra parameters to be there in the HTML because you don't want the spiders to see the extra parameters. However, you can program the link with javascript so that when it experiences a javascript "ondown" (meaning "mouse button was depressed on this link"), it adds the extra argument to the URL. Then you'll get that extra argument in the destination URL only when a human is using a mouse, and not when a spider is just reading your HTML.

We got the general information on how to do this from WebTrends, but anybody who is good at javascript should be able to implement it. Sorry I can't be more specific; I just ask engineers to do it.

[onlineleben]

Thanks for the explanation. Nice feature, but I thought that spiders don't execute Javascript and therefore any link you put into Javascript isn't visible for them.

[cgrantski]

It's embarrassing to say this, but I got carried away and was talking about what we do for sites that are not using js tagging. You are exactly right. My ondown suggestion had to do with only server logs!

[Copywriter39]

I don't believe it opens in another window. When someone clicks on a banner it accesses the data base to let them know its gone through and then the visitor is redirected to the site. Yet, the analytics for these sites don't show the incoming redirect.

[cgrantski]

Another possibility, unlikely from your description, but I'll put it here anyway. Is the traffic flowing from a secure page to an unsecure one? That's another case where the referrer field is empty.

[Copywriter39]

In most cases that I know of, it's going from an unsecure site to another unsecure site.