Forum Moderators: martinibuster
let met explain:
if the user comes with organic traffic, i wanna show him PPC ads. because i didn't pay to get him there. logical?
IF the user came in via an adword ad, i want to hide the google ads.
i use PHP so i can check the referrer etc.
is there a variable to check to see if the user arrives via unpaid or commercial "ads"?
crick: ... :)
[edited by: Eazygoin at 5:04 pm (utc) on April 3, 2006]
The only thing I would add is to redirect the user to index.html (or whatever) after setting the cookie, so that users don't inadvertently bookmark the AdWords version of the URL.
DO NOT change the URL that users are sent to in rder to implement this, it may cause a big reduction in your ad ranking. It will probably be easier to parse html files as php to do the tracking if the destination pages are not dynamic already.
Here is a typical conversion tracked google URL as it appears in a logfile:
GET /yourpage.php?yourparameters=here&gclid=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1
The gclid value is made up of upper and lowercase letters, numbers and a few other characters - I think it is similar in origin to the internal unique ID's given to apache requests. It's there to pass details to your tracking code, interestingly you do not need code to be present to have this feature on. I found this out by accident and it's handy to use in ROI tracking.
inbound: mind explaining further?
1. Are the advert landing pages dynamic? (php/asp/other)
2. If the landing pages are static (htm/html) then do you host on Linux? and do you have control over most of the server settings?
3. Do you know what to do with the coding (cookie/sessionID) once you know the visitor has arrived through AdWords?
4. What are you unsure of? I'm sorry I maybe wasn't too clear, I often miss important information due to assuming people will know (it also does not help I didn't have much time to post in).
Please keep this on the forum and non-specific, that way others can benefit from it (i.e. no sticky mail please).
what i wondered was basically how the urls differ exactly. you provided an example, but i didnt get how it differed, really, and how you check it.
Here is an URL that a visitor would go to without coming from Google, conversion tracked, advertising:
www.example.com/yourpage.php?yourparameters=here
And with tracking on:
www.example.com/yourpage.php?yourparameters=here&gclid=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1
You only need to check for whether gclid exists, if it's there then you know it's a Google paid visitor. There are simple pre-defined functions that will return the value of GET parameters pairs.
E.G.
$gclidcontents = $_REQUEST['gclid'];
The above only loads the value of gclid into a variable, you could just use a conditional statement if you don't want to know what the value of gclid. To make this advice suitable for all, the pseudo code for this is as such:
IF gclid is not "" THEN do not show adverts ELSE show adverts END IF
so gclid is the key. this could prove very useful indeed....
you can just check referers too, not 100%, but may be good enough
in your adwords you can add tracking strings yourself, which I always did and then test for those specific $_GET params.
tracking == AdWords conversion tracking
as inbound explained above
it shows more google propaganda :/
using urls something like this in your ads
www.example.com/page.html?src=G4
I numbered campaigns and keywords within those campaigns, takes a bit of time but works very well
