Conversion Tracking

Sanity check - what am I missing?

[paladin]

Hi,
We are using cookies to track conversions. The problem that I have is that there are a lot of conversions that I see by following the log files that do not show up in cookie tracking systems. We are using 2 different cookie tracking systems – Google Conversion Tracking and our own custom tracking.

This is how we have it set up:
When visitor land on our site at http://www.example.com/?campaign=campaignInfo , the page has both the Google tracking code/pixel for landing pages along with a 1x1 pixel from https://bb.example.com/folderName/pixelFileName. When the user completes the order it is at [bb.example.com...] and [bb.example.com...] Google and our custom tracking codes are on this thank you page.

We set the cookies so that they would last of 90 days and would not be restricted by sub-domains or SSL. We also added the P3P privacy Policy as at [w3.org...]

Yet we are still missing conversions. They do convert, but they show up as no source instead of the specific campaign.

Is it just that many browsers are not setting/saving/sending the cookies? Or did I miss something obvious?

[HighConversions]

It could be a lot of different things depending on how your custom cookies are stored and how your cart works. First off, I'd set my cookies to last longer than 90 days. Secondly, if you're only using logs to track conversions (or a processing page) then there's probably some disconnect between your cookies and your cart. Cookies are not transferable from other domains. An example of this is of a customer coming into http://www.yoursite.com and then checking out at https://secure.yoursite.com. I don't think cookies will be readable from a sub-domain, but, I could be wrong. There are ways to get around this if your cart is written to do it correctly.

I recommend clearing your cookies and coming through the site as a customer would and purchase something. Perhaps even writing out the cookie values throughout the process so you can see where/if the cookie suddenly disappears.

After doing this, review your conversion tracking methods to see if you can track your purchase as a conversion or not.

You have to be very careful and very meticulous when writing your own conversion tracking system. Also, you have to test, test, test to make sure things work!

[edited by: HighConversions at 3:53 pm (utc) on Mar. 12, 2007]

[edited by: lorax at 8:12 pm (utc) on Mar. 12, 2007]
[edit reason] delinked [/edit]

[paladin]

I tried that, and in my case on both IE & FF it tracked.

The strange thing is that even if our internal code may not be perfect, I'd expect the Google Tracking to catch those - but that is also off.

[HighConversions]

This may sound really odd but....Does your hosting company have Webtrends or another web-log analyzing software running?

Sometimes, those softwares will go through a physicall directory and load each page. This would show that a particlar page loaded 'x' amount of times and can screw things up.