Poor results with conversion tracking system

[kapow]

We are developing a conversion tracking system. Currently its only managing to track about 1 in 3 conversons. ie the referrer and keywords of website visitors who make a purchase.

1 in 3 is annoyingly low :(
Can anyone tell me a typical tracking success rate?

I'm wondering if the problem is to do with cookies. Are there known problems with placing 2 cookies on the visitors computer? ie one for the tracker and one for the shopping cart id.

We know the visitors accept cookies otherwise they couldn't use the shopping cart. Our system uses php and mysql.

[cgrantski]

If you open your logs and examine the purchasing visits very carefully you will probably get an idea of what's going wrong. Make sure the cookies are there when you expect them, make sure the cart pages are recognizable to the analysis program, and most of all make sure the analysis is dividing hits into visits correctly. And so on.

After you do this (use Excel to make the logs more readable) you'll probably have a more precise question. Basically if you can't correctly identify your conversions through manual inspection of the logs, then your site isn't set up to get the right information into the logs. If you can, then there might be an error in your conversion tracking logic.

[Easy_Coder]

I see roughly 2% click thru rate on the views and I am currently converting 5% of those clickthrus to purchases which translates to approx. 10% of my monthly gross.

I'm tracking the referrring URL in a session level variable then storing it in my system at the customer account level when the purchase occurs. My system like yours relys on Cookies but so does my cart so I don't really fret about that too much.