Forum Moderators: DixonJones
I'm looking at a link tracking service, which I want to use to track where exactly where my sales are coming from. Up until now I've beeb using traffic analysers like Hitslink, which are excellent for looking at traffic trends, but I'm wanting to know more about what's producing the actual sales.
So, I'm looking at QuickPayPro, which tracks each customer from start to finish and analyses the results. All pretty basic, but cool to a relative newbie like me.
To do this, I need to set up a unique link for each "campaign" I'm running. This isn't a problem for links which I place in ezines, on other sites, or ads (PPC and solo if I ever get around to having a large enough budget for these), but becomes tricky if I'm trying to track the source of sales from search engine users. This is of course because I could set up unique links, but they'd all be duplicates of my sales page, which will mean them being penalized or ignored in the long run.
I could write numerous versions of the sales page, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I've already got teo versions, and in any case, if I end up with loads of versions of the same thing, I won't get a true picture of which search engines are the most popular, because I won't know if it's the page or the search engine which is producing the goods.
So...I'm thinking I need to limit the activities of the robots. I thought of a robots.txt file, but it would need to be pretty complicated to specify which search engines could reach which pages. It seems simpler to do a meta tag for each of the pages, but I read that there are only a limited number of robots supporting such meta tags.
This will all be standard for the old hands among you, but I'm trying to fathom out what's my best course of action;
i) Should I write a robots.txt file, and if so, anyone got any examples of what one for this sort of problem would look like?
ii) How many robots actually support robots meta tags (I'm only really interested in the ones for the big nine or so search engines)
iii) Anyone got a list of robot names that I can use to go with either option?
Of course, there's probably some cunning, but simple way of achieving what I'm after, but I'm damned if my brain can fathom it at this time in the morning, so I'm hoping you guys can come up with the goods!
Thanks
lol :)
I am sure there is, as I have heard a number of people talking about this stuff lately, however as I am NOT a techie, I dont understand it fully.
However I am on working on it, through a translator, and shall share my findings.
Shak
