PPC Traffic / Conversion

How do I know where the traffic is coming from.

[babushka99]

I have various PPC Campaigns running. Like Adwards (from Google), Kanoodle, Overture, MetricsDirect, About.com, Business.com, GoClick, etc.

Please don't bash me for asking a newbie question.

All of the clicks come to this single "BUY" page on my site. How do I figure out the following:

1. From where is the traffic is coming from? i.e. can I tell this traffic is coming from Google, or this is coming from Overture or this is coming from About.com? If yes, what needs to be done? Something tells me this is more than just a function of my webstats software?!?!? right?

2. Once traffic comes into my Buy page, they have to go through 2 more pages (fill out forms, etc.) before a sales is completed - my quesion is How do I find out that the 30 or so clicks that came from Google, were actually converted into Sales. Well Google may be easier, because they have some form of a tracking tool, but what about others?

I know I am missing something there.

Any help/articles in this manner would be most appreciated.

TIA

Babs.

[roitracker]

The best option is to use a 3rd party tracking software/service to track your ads/PPC campaigns - there's plenty to choose from.

[tfanelli]

Ok here is the concept for this. If you append your link in the search engine with something like this:

yourdomain.com/page.html?engine=overture&term=whatever

Have a java programmer (or use a third party program to track this) make some code that will read everything after the? in the url and store the engine and term values. Then on the final page of the purchase process read the cookie and the values for engine and term and have them add them to the order once it is submitted. Then when you get the order it will contain the engines and terms and you can track which one are most profitable.

[Drackox]

3rd party tracking systems cost money. In a world of trying to save money to make money, you can do the following:

Create a mySQL database where your table row will containg the following:

idkey - a unique id key, just auto_increment
se - search engine
kw - keyword
ut - unix timestamp

You would pass a information directly from the PPC search engine kind of like what tfanelli stated.

yourdomain.com/page.html?engine=overture&term=whatever

The unix timestamp can be called in php like this:

<?
$timestamp = date(U);
?>

Then all you have to do is make a PHP script to get the data so you can read it. It's free and very effective. This was a very basic example, you can do so much more.