Intermediate tracking sites

[Jon12345]

I have noticed that some Adwords advertisers have this set up:

Adwords > tracking site > actual site

...where the tracking site just logs the stats and then they are immediately redirected to the actual site.

Questions:

1. Why would they do this and not just track from the actual site?

2. Is this against Google TOS since you are not directing them to the landing page but instead going via an intermediate page?

3. Would this affect your quality score?

4. Do the other search engines, like MSN, Yahoo etc allow this intermediate tracking site?

Thanks,

Jon

[mimmo]

We have always done it: our first Adwords page returns a 302 to the landing page. QS is still OK. Looking at our log, it seems that Google AdBot follows the 302 and checks the landing page. Why would this be a problem?

[phranque]

i would guess they use a tracking site so that they can use cookies to track across domains.

[kea12345]

You also have better control of tracking.

Say, you want to insert "Test2" into your tracking code, you would do this on your intermediate site. The other case would be you append your tracking code in the destination URL, if you inserted and made a change to put "Test2" into your destination url, then your ad history would be lost. Not so by making the change on the intermediate site.

[mimmo]

exactly