Anyone know of sales tracking software?

To track sales by search engine by search words used for home pg links

[abra4magic]

We are able to track sales from unique url's using a web based service, that works similiar to affiliate tracking software.

However, we can't do the same with our home page! As search engines link our main index page or other pages with our standard url.

What we need is the ability to track sales by search engine by search words used.

Page views alone mean nothing. Sales do!

Our GOAL: To be able to determine which words bring in most of the sales, to be able to optimize our search engine rankings for those words.

Urchin and webtrends are working on lower cost versions of this and have been waiting all year, but they're still in betatest.

Does anyone know of software that does this? Selling for $500 or less.

Thanks!

[sun818]

I use Mal's Cart (a free shopping cart). I had a programmer write me a cookie that would store the referral URL for 7 days. When the user clicks on the "Add to Cart" button, the referral URL is passed to a hidden field in the shopping cart. It requires the client to have JavaScript and Cookies enabled so it will miss some buyers.

Now that I know what some of the other keywords are for buyers, I will be creating separate pages for these keywords.

[abra4magic]

Thanks for the quick response. I just posted this less than 30 min ago!

We use MIVA 4.12, I'll have to check if we can do this.

Can you tell me where the search string (words) can be found in the url?

Is it quick and easy enough for our data entry people to figure it out?

As currently we reenter the order into another software, into which we can track sales source, so we'd just issue a sales source code for each search word/engine combo.

Thanks!

Bob

[sun818]

With many search or metasearch engines (Google, AltaVista, Fast, MetaCrawler, Dogpile), the query string is between the q= and the next ampersand ( & ). If spaces, double quotes, or pluses exist in the search query, these characters will be converted to their HEX equivalent of %20 (or the + character instead), %22, and %2B respectively.