Clear Gifs for Tracking

any down side?

[vmills]

A hotel site uses a booking engine hosted on a separate domain. I want to track numbers of visitors who click to enter the booking engine, those who actually book rooms, and where they came from (search engines etc). It is my understanding that some log file analysis programs can do this if I get the booking engine to place clear gifs on the relevant pages on their site.

If I understand this correctly, I send them a clear gif which links to, for example, www.hotelsite.com/images/paid.gif, and they place it on the page (in this case, a "thank you" page). Calls for that image file will show up in my log files.

Are there any down sides to this process? I see lots of references to use of clear gifs in privacy policies, but it doesn't seem evil to me since I'm not collecting any private data. Perhaps the objections are when they are used with cookies.

I guess what I'm asking is whether this practice is considered to be completely ethical and is search-engine approved (not considered any kind of spam).

Thanks

[edit_g]

It might be considered spam to have a 1x1 gif link from one site to another but you should be ok using it for tracking. Search engines won't see the thank you page anyhow (I expect there are a few forms to fill out before you say thank you) so you should be fine. If you're extra worried put the page in robots.txt as one not to be crawled.

[vmills]

Thanks for the reply. The robots.txt file is a good idea. I'll try that.

[ritualcoffee]

I've never seen any engine problems with blank pixel tagging... just don't keyword stuff them! ;)

There are other pros and cons for this type of analysis that don't have anything to do with engines - but you may want to weigh those issues as well.

[vmills]

I'd love to hear the pros and cons of pixel tagging if you have a minute to relay them, or if you know of any sources that discuss it in some depth. I'm looking at several traffic analysis programs right now to see how best to track conversions (for less than the $1,000-and-up per month that I've frequently seen quoted).

A system that uses Javascript and cookies might work (I know of only one affordable ASP for this--I don't know how to build it myself), but I also thought I should look into using the pixel gifs and log file analysis. I haven't been able to set up trials yet, and I'm not sure how well it will work.

I'm new to this level of tracking and appreciate any information or advice I can get on ways to track conversions. I'm hopeful I can find a workable and affordable solution.

Thanks

[figment88]

many browsers and privacy protection software add-ons will block these tracking pixels and your cookies because they are third party.

The best way around this is if you have tight relations with the merchant to have them delegate you a subdomain that points to your tracking server - that way you are nolonger third party.

For example, the url would have the form of:
[affiliate.merchant.com...]

One thing I do routinely is source tracking images with javascript. This method bypasses most privacy filters (since there is no image displayed) but obvioulsy won't work if someone has JavaScript turned off.

Example:
<script>
pix = new Image();
pix.src=http://www.affiliate.com/track.gif;
</script>

I also like the javascript approach because it makes it easy to add additional variables onto the call.