Tracking: From First Encounter to page to sales

Get to know my user. From click on banner or search engines to sales....

[TELSi]

Hello,

I have following problem:
We have a website, where we sell products. A week ago, we started advertising the page to get new customers.
I am really interested in getting to know my users better. I would like to track e.g. how many banners the user have to see until he places an order. Or how many newsletters do I have to send, before a product is bought. How many users, who come via e.g. the SE google to our side, place a order, how many of them not... Or how many visits to the page, until a sales is made.

Is there a enhanced web tracking program which uses e.g. cookie technology to track the user down ????? Or do we have to develop this ourselves ?

Thanks,
Telsi

[jatar_k]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com] TELSi

In my personal experience I haven't seen an out of the box solution that has adequately addressed this yet. All of the systems that have done a good job have been custom. You may just have to do it yourself.

I would try google.

[MCookie]

I'm using LogitPRO for 1.5 years now and haven't seen anything better yet.

[edited by: mark_roach at 5:06 pm (utc) on Sep. 3, 2002]

[Mardi_Gras]

Went to the logitpro web site - didn't see anything there that even begins to resemble the functionality that TELSi is looking for - and that I have looked for in the past. When you go to the demo page it asks for a login ID.

Am I missing something?

[MCookie]

No password is needed on the demo page... just use the links at the left.

[TELSi]

Hi folks,
thanks for your answers.
But I think MCookie didn't really get what I am looking for.
I am not looking for a enhanced logfile statistic program, as I think LogIT Pro stands for (top referrers, top visitors, top files and so on).

I am looking for something more sophisticated. I want to track every single user movement. How often does this single user come, where does he/she come from (e.g. SE, direct input...). If the user responds to my newsletter mailings, how often, if the user wants to buy products, how many, is information important etc.´

A "normal" logfile program don't give me the insights in this single user. But thats what I am interested in.

Thanks,

TELSi

[TELSi]

to jatar_k:

I tried google, but didn't find anything. any help?

I was thinking about having a solution being developed. Maybe there are more out there who are interested in this...

TELSi

[MCookie]

LogitPRO actually does track every move of your users. Every page they've been on, how long they've been there, where they came from, how often, what platform, what browser, etc. It's not just tracking top refs etc. It just takes some time getting to know the thing..

[Black Knight]

Dart have a good tracking solution for ads, and developing your own is certainly possible. Instead of just serving a graphic, you need to serve a script that does document.write(); and tracks the http information from each call, assigning a cookie with a unique tracking ID to each user.

Of course, this will be a pain, hard to setup, and will be blocked by quite a few users.

Tracking solutions usually have to be a mixture of the three basics:

Dedicated landing pages for each campaign so that each hit to that page is identified back to a specific campaign.

Cookie tracking to keep track of information beyond each individual session, thus tying the sessions together.

Server side information gleaned from HTTP requests and session tracking.

Ammon Johns
Internet Marketing Consultant

[jatar_k]

TELSi,

thinking about it more you will probably need to develop something yourself.

>>I want to track every single user movement

This is the main reason, I think I would go with a mix of cookies and ip tracking stored in a db and then you can plug all of your different systems together (newsletter, shopping cart, site). It is a lot of time to develop but if that is what you need you should be able to do it.

[TELSi]

Black Knight: Sorry but DART doesn't make any sense? I don't know it. What is it and where do I find information about this?

Thanks,

TELSi

[skibum]

DART is DoubleClick's ad serving "solution" There is also AtlasDMT and some other ones.

With DART we are able to track impressions, clicks, and conversions in aggregate. Banner 1 got 2500 clicks, and of those 2500 clicks, 2000 people viewed the landing page, 800 viewed some other page and 400 hit the conversion page.

To the best of my knowledge it does not go down to the individual user level, it does not work with regular search referrals where a redirect can not be included in the URL. There is some kind of "view through" stuff in DART that will tell you the number of people that saw an ad and then visited the site or hit a conversion page but I don't think it is possible ot take into account other factors. Say someone has been a customer for a while, then happenes to view a page with one of your ads, then buys something. This might lead to the assuption that the person saw an ad didn't click through but did come to the site later and purchased something - which is all true, except that they were already a customer so the ad probably had no effect.

As has been suggested already it may take a combination of different services/packages to achieve the level of detail you are looking for. If you search for pay per click tracking services you will find some that can track conversion by PPC search term and some that offer some kind of tracking for regular search referrals.

Without building something custom, there is probably not one tool, that is inexpesively priced that will do all the desired functions.

[Mikkel Svendsen]

I think I know what you are looking for and I am pretty sure you will find it in WebTrends Reporting Center - but you ned the enterprise edition which I think starts at approx $10,500 - and then comes hardware, updates, support and all that.

With this package you can track conversions down to single keyword and user level, calculate ROI, set up special sceniario reporting, customized reports etc. I think you will find all you need - but then again, it dosen't come free :)

[Black Knight]

Developing your own system would certainly seem to be the way to go judging from the replies so far.

Using JavaScript to create, manipulate and read cookies is very simple. I use a custom cookie solution myself for PPC conversion tracking for some of my clients.

There are a few essentials you need to know:

1. Cookies are limited real estate. A single browser may only hold 300 cookies in total at any one time.
   
2. A single domain can set an absolute maximum of 20 cookies. This means that as few as 15 domains could fill the entire cookie quota on a pc.
   
3. Newer cookies flush the older ones, so if there are significant periods between visits, your cookies may have been flushed by the massive numbers of cookies set by banner advertisers, search engines, portals and trackers on sites that your customers may have visited in the meantime.
   
4. It is therefore vital that we all learn to use as few cookies as possible, and store multiple fields of data in a single cookie. A single cookie can be upto 4,000 characters long, which is plenty.
   

These should get you started:

Webmonkey JavaScript tutorial on cookies [hotwired.lycos.com]

Code for JavaScript, VB and CGI cookies [simonstl.com]

Great article about 'Intelligent' cookies [tech.irt.org]

Ammon Johns