Tracking Goto click throughs?

[legster]

Obviously we see how much traffic we get from Goto, and under what keywords, and how much it costs us. But when you have tons of other traffic coming in, how do you know that Goto traffic is really paying off?

Is there a better way to track Goto traffic? Since affiliate programs track an incoming user and watch what they do, whether they fill out a form or such. Could this also be used to track users from a search engine? What I was thinking is having a mirror image of my main page but just for Goto users. Have the page hidden from spiders to make sure just Goto traffic used it. Then when the user arrives they get a cookie that tracks where they go in the site and what they do? Of course I am not a programmer, so I don't know how or if this is possible. I am only thinking of the comparisons of how affiliate programs work. So can I do this? Should I do this, and if so any tips on how to do this? :)

Thanks for any advice you have to offer.

[Mike_Mackin]

The simple way to track just GoTo users on an affiliate program is to sign up again for the affiliate program and send just the goto traffic to the new URLstring.

AND
From the GoTo site:
How do I know where my traffic is coming from?
We recommend that all of our advertisers use tracking URLs on all of their advertising. After all, your budget and the success of your business are important to you. Tracking URLs can work on any site where a click is used as a measurement. Once you have a tracking URL for all of your advertising buys, you'll be able to do an equal and balanced comparison among each of the advertising vendors to determine which works best for you. And those sites are the ones where you should continue to advertise. Remember, keep your eye on the bottom line!

[bill]

There was a discussion about this [url=www.webmasterworld.com/forum33/112.htm]last year[/url]. A few people mentioned good results.

Essentially all you do is add this to the end of all your links:

?source=goto

[MaliciousDan]

This might be the drastic crash course method, but one way to find out is to see what happens when you turn your goto listings off for a day (I don't use goto but I believe I remember someone saying you could easily turn all listings on and off). The better solution is of course putting something in the URL to identify it as a goto click through.

[legster]

Thanks for the comments. I think I didn't make my question clear though. I already know how much traffic I am getting from Goto, that's easy.

What I want to track is what the user is doing once he arrives at my site. Similar to what an affiliate program does. Thanks.

[Bolotomus]

If you have an affiliate program you could make all GOTO traffic automatically fall under a certain "in house" affiliate number you use for tracking them.

I did this for one site which had some banner ads that linked to the homepage. The homepage was really a perl script, but it appeared as 'index.html' because in Apache I set up

ScriptMatch /index.html /usr/httpd/cgi-bin/homepage.pl

Now, homepage.pl was sneaky, it checked for 'goto.com' in $ENV{HTTP_REFERER} and would redirect to a page which sets the affiliate # to 100001 (our special code for this banner ad). From there we just let the affiliate system do its thing. If it didn't come from goto.com it just printed the contents of the /index.html page.

If you DON'T have an affiliate system what you're really asking for is a sleazy alternative to an affiliate system. OK, I know one. Set some kind of cookie when they come into to site from goto.com, then when they check out, check to see if that cookie is set. If it is, do something special for them (write it to a logfile, e.g.).

Bolotomus