How do I track where my buyers come from?

Affiliates, ok! But what about search engines?

[sun818]

How would I track visitors from search engine results that buy my widgets? Using an affiliate system, I can easily track buyers from Google AdWords and Overture. What I want is the ability to link the referral keywords buyers use when they purchase my widget. This would indicate the successful keywords or the Google snippet [webmasterworld.com] that motivates your buyer. Are there shopping carts that can do this? Thanks!

[edited by: sun818 at 8:06 pm (utc) on Sep. 27, 2002]

[brotherhood of LAN]

A scripting language like PHP can gather the referrer to a page. Maybe this is the sort of thing you'd like to see.

Raw logs should also contain a referrer.

If you put your referrers,logs,sales etc into databases, then it should be a dawdle to compare them.

[sun818]

So, are you suggesting I join referral links from my web log with the orders database based on time? That does seem possible. How would you handle multiple visitors browsing the site at once? By visiting IP?

[brotherhood of LAN]

I'm not sure what you mean there sun818,

Your goal is to see who buys and what referral they are yeah?

Then you will know the IP address of the buyer no doubt...compare that to the referral.

If you had it all in a database...you can mix and match the sort of data you will be after

i.e. 100 sales from 1000 visitors using X keyword
10 sales from 20 visitors using Y keyword
0 sales from 1000 visitors using OT keyword

You already know what keywords you target, so all you need to know is who is buying what and what keyword they "chose" :)

Can I ask what you aim to do...reasons etc for you asking the q?

[sun818]

Your goal is to see who buys and what referral they are yeah?

yeah.

Can I ask what you aim to do...reasons etc for you asking the q?

My thought is I can generate additional sales if I optimize for other keywords. And since I have hundreds of keywords in my referral log to choose from, which ones to optimize for? My criteria would be to use keywords that generated sales in the past. Or perhaps I need could re-arrange my content so the Google snippet is more coherent. What do you think?

On the technology aspect, this tracking thread [webmasterworld.com] is closer to what I was asking. Your "mix and match" suggestion sounds very possible. I'll see what I come up with tonight.

[brotherhood of LAN]

I think the Google snippet is good for getting visitors to click, though I'm not so sure if it will sway them in the buying process...though there are many people in here who study these things for a living - me not one of them (at the mo) :)

I scanned through that thread you referenced, I didn't read that first time round when it was posted....though from what I've read in these "type" threads....this sort of tracking is a definite must..the more info and specific info you can gather about visitors,sales,non-sales etc and the harnessing of that info is the best thing you can do for longer term planning.

For me, ideally, I'll be working with mySQL in future. If I were to want something like you have in mind, I'd use PHP to catch these variables and be put alongside all other data i use on the site...as opposed to a "glue on" off the shelf thing.

[Crazy_Fool]

i'd say probably best to ask tracking and logging questions in the tracking and logging forum - there may be someone using that forum but not the ecommerce forum who will have a simple solution for you.

[sun818]

Thanks.

[jatar_k]

or if you scifically want a php answer you can come over our way [webmasterworld.com]. ;)

You can definitely use php and a db to do this. Cookie them and log their IP and keep the referral string in either or both.

When a sale is made you use all of these to cross reference them and see where they came from and what brought them here.

[sun818]

Thanks jatar. I paid a programmer to write me a cookie. It passes the referral URL as a hidden variable to my shopping cart. Now to find that thread on how to include JavaScript files into web pages... :)