tracking natural serps and adwords conversions

way to do both?

[esllou]

I have a site where I get natural SERP traffic which converts to sales....and I use G AdWords too which also convert. I send AW traffic directly to the site and don't just use affiliate redirect url's.

so...what is the best way to separate SERP conversions from AW conversions. I could use?ref=AW in the AdWords urls but it wouldn't help track conversions.

And I can't use AW conversion tracking as there isn't a "sales page"...I send people off to affiliate sites.

ideas?

[esllou]

right, I have solved this problem but have been left with another.

In the end, I just copied the directory and am sending AWords users to the new copied directory.

My natural SERP traffic will continue to land at example.com/widgets/ but now I have redirected all my G AWords traffic to an exact copy of the same directory example.com/widgets-aw/ and have changed all my affiliate tracking id's in that directory so, from today, can precisely track the effectiveness of AWords advertising.

So the problem I am left with is duplicate content.

My new directory is only accessible via AWords ads and no other way. I have to allow Google Mediabot therefore as I have AdSense on those pages. But I would like to stop the possibility of Googlebot being prompted by Mediabot from indexing the new directory as it is obviously duplicate content.

Can I just use robots.txt to do this SAFELY:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /widgets-aw

any problems envisaged? Would it be safer to use robot meta tags in the new widgets-aw directory? Anything I am overlooking?

Thanks in advance....

[PPCBidder]

IMO using a duplicate directory is a bad solution. Just use the?ref=AW variable to dynamically load the tracking id you want in your links.

[esllou]

yeah, that sounds a neater solution. Where would I go about looking for that type of solution? What would I have to work with: php, perl?

any ready-made solutions available on script sites that you know of?

[jogrady]

esllou,

What I do is ad the variable (i.e. ggl=adgroup.) Then I use webtrend to generate reports. WT and Urchin has a lot of support for organic search.

John

[esllou]

well, as usual when I get "big" ideas for my site, I hammered out a radical solution in three days and pretty much didn't sleep or eat for much of that time!

I have changed everything into PHP and dynamically load different affiliate id's depending on the?variables on the incoming referrer. Lot of work but worth it in the long run.

[eWhisper]

There are 3rd party tracking solutions that separate out PPC results from natural serp results, and let you compare them both side by side.

They're usually ROI based tracking software platforms so you have to tie in the code to your shopping cart.

With these solutions, there is usually some lost referrers. Which ones are lost usually depends on if it's a java/3rd party cookie based system, or a server side system. ( [webmasterworld.com...] has more info on java vs server side )

Of course, if you're sending the traffic off to another site for the conversion, your ability to place code on the other site is key to these software types working accurately.