Tracking referrals from shopping engines

like Froogle, Kelkoo, Bizrate etc

[fom2001uk]

Do referrals from these product engines show up in your standard referrer stats or do you need to set up separate tracking for them?

I've never used these product engines before so I'm not sure of the answer.

[fom2001uk]

Does anybody know this?

[JackieLane]

We have used WebTrends as a provider / solution for our referral logs. We get pretty basic information, though. Referring search engine data is given (Google, MSN, Yahoo), as well as any other sites that refer traffic (even www.ourcompany.com). I am assuming, then, that product engine data would be provided. Data is given in terms of traffic volume--clicks, unique visitors.

We did not receive any type of conversion data, however, such as sales that were generated from a search engine. If this is something you are interested in, there are several options out there for you. One option would be to set up a Virtual Affiliate™ campaign (this is available in LinkConnector, affiliate network). This type of campaign tracks all your search engine traffic (it could be configured to track a product search engine's traffic) through to ROI. So, it tracks your conversions, sales, leads, etc.

[willthegeek]

This is highly dependent on your stats package. The more expensive products will show referal data with the refering site, page visited, tracking code for page, link or product and so on. But there are also some more affordable ones that can do it.

The best list I have received was from a search on MSN. You can go to MSN and search for "Web Analytics" and get a good selection of providers of this type of information. You can check out their features and get a pretty god idea of what can be done and how it is done.

[cgrantski]

No matter what stats package you use, you'll probably have to do some extra work to get this kind of information into the raw data that the reporting packages get fed. For purchases, for example, it involves code that obtains and records 1) the fact that a purchase occurred, 2) the amount of money. Plus other things, if you want.

If your site is set up to get this information, quite a few inexpensive stats packages can give you summaries of some kind.

If your site isn't set up for it, the more expensive stats packages will sell you the code described above, or the consulting required to get the code, disguised as a "reporting tag" or whatever they choose to call it in their sales pitch.

That's really about all these things are, but they tend to sell it as some kind of magic.

[fom2001uk]

cgrantski, the sales info is already recorded by the stats package I'm using.

Conversions, sales etc is not the problem here.

I just want to know how you can pick out a specific referral from these shopping engines.

[cgrantski]

Okay, got it. I think. You want to know if you can identify through referrer field tabulations what shopping engine brought what traffic to your site? And by shopping engine I'm guessing you mean shopping.com, bizrate, nextag, froogle, etc? It seems to vary, in my data. Looks like some of them have nothing in the referrer field but they put a marker in the landing URL, such as "&ref=bizrate". Shopping.com seems to show up with a referrer of dealtime.com, not shopping.com. Nextag seems to be the same as bizrate. Froogle and shopping.yahoo show up in referrer fields, seems like. I don't know if this helps, and I don't know if what I see is the norm or if these patterns only identify part of nextag's etc traffic.

But if what I'm describing is correct, it means not all of your shopping engines are going to display in reports that tabulate what's in the referrer field. Some of your "no referrer" visits could be from shopping engines and for those you'll have to figure out the name of the parameter they insert in the landing URL. "ref" & "source" are 2 that I'm seeing.

[fom2001uk]

Thanks, that's what I was looking for. Looks like I've got some serious delving to do :-)