Same Old Same Old

[TSadmin]

Hello All,

I have been reading these posts on WW and I feel bad for asking this question again. I am having a hard time finding a way of tracking a few basic things and not over paying for lots of extras. There are 3 things I really need,

1) Track visitors from Overture/Google not just their initial visit but if they come back and buy. We are seeing that most people are clicking in through PPC but coming back 2-3 days later to buy.

2) ClickStream so we can see what parts of our site are usable and which are not.

3) Finally it has to be cost effective. We are not at the point where we can afford some of these services.

Any thoughts on this are appreciated.

Thanks
Alex

[Receptional]

Hi TS Admin,

I'm assuming, then, that saying [webmasterworld.com...] to you is old hat? The question: Tracks conversion data for PPC campaigns? and the price range is answered for you. For path analysis functionality you'll have to check out based on the other two questions being OK.

There is a problem with answering your question (and many like it) dorectly. This question solicits advertising and you will find that any personal recommendations tend to get nuked from these boards extremely quickly. Webmasterworld can point you in the right dorection, but as a forum we encourage people to go and do their own research in the final analysis.

[cgrantski]

3633 [webmasterworld.com] has all of this information displayed systematically, except for the first question about delayed effects of PPC, or of any other kind of marketing for that matter. That's not a common capability and it's not implied in 3633 [webmasterworld.com]'s question "Tracks conversion data for PPC".

Receptional, if you can figure out a way to add this to 3633 [webmasterworld.com]'s entries, I'd be happy to supply what I know to try to get it up to speed. Or is there a better way? It's quite an important feature, and it would be fantastic if 3633 [webmasterworld.com] can continue to be the one spot on WWW for systematic capabilities info.

There are variations people can put into their annotations ... like whether the "active" period for a campaign is set by the user, and whether it's campaign-by-campaign or a global setting.

Meanwhile, TSAdmin, for your first question just make sure that your site is giving out permanent cookies NOW, so when and if you get the tools, you'll have the necessary data to do an historical analysis.

If your site doesn't get a lot of traffic, you can actually do this in Excel with a little work. If you have the cookie.

[edited by: Receptional at 5:04 pm (utc) on May 22, 2006]
[edit reason] linked 3663 as it confused me [/edit]

[Receptional]

I think that
"Tracks conversion data for PPC campaigns?" is as far as we can really go before people have to start looking at each package individually. TSAdmin's specific requirement itself needs defining at his end. 2-3 days sounds like in his case this is the same lead, but for others it is a week... a month... a user session...

The definition is what constitues a "unique user" and there we have massive questions [webmasterworld.com] that the world has never universally answered. [webmasterworld.com]

[cgrantski]

Makes sense. Okay.

In response to TSAdmin's question, then ... the ones I know can track latent effects are: WebTrends, Omniture, Hitbox. There could be many others.