What is the best method for tracking adwords visitors?

[budbiss]

I am new to the whole tracking and logging thing. What method to you all use to track where your adwords visitors came from? Adwords site says that you can put "?source=adwords" after the url and I guess then you would see this in your logger, but I tried this and I don't see anything in AWStats. Am I going about things the wrong way here? What method do most people use?

[eWhisper]

You might want to do a few site searches for:
"adwords conversion tracking" and "adwords tracking".

Here are a couple threads to get you started:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

There are about as many answers as there are tracking methods. The first thing to determine is which stats are imporntant to you: ROI, page views, newsletter signups, conversions, etc.

[budbiss]

Thanks Whisper. I will take a look at the links you mentioned ASAP. Basically at this time my biggest concerns are: (in order)

1) What keywords visitors are using to get to our site (AWStats currently does a decent job of this).
2) What sites our visitors are coming from and if they are coming from a PPC site or not (I'm not able to get AWStats to do this).
3) Total number of hits to our site per month and per day (btw, we already can see this information via AWStats right now).

[budbiss]

Whisper, thanks again for the links, but I don't see anything within those threads that mentions how to veiw tracking urls in AWStats.

Does anyone know how to do this?

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Whisper, thanks again for the links, but I don't see anything within those threads that mentions how to veiw tracking urls in AWStats.

Does anyone know how to do this?

Budbiss, sorry to disappoint, but there isn't a way to track your tracking URLs from within your AdWords Stats. It is something that one has to track from their web server logs.

The closest you'll come from within your account is to look at the actual numbers of impressions and clicks you have received, per keyword, for a given date range. This tells you exactly how many people have seen your ad, per keyword, and how many of those folks have also clicked.

The date range tool allows you to see a date range as short as 'today' or as long as the entire life of your account. Or any range of days inbetween.

BTW, do be aware the stats you see for 'today' are not real time. They average about three hours behind on the Campaign Summary page - and longer on individual campaign or Ad Group pages.

AWA

[eWhisper]

AWA,
Sometimes it's not about Google. Really. :) AWStats [awstats.sourceforge.net] is an open source log analyzer.

Budbiss,
to be honest, I don't know the answer about AWStats and it's abilities. I was referring to other tracking systems and ways people have used to track adwords. You might try hopping over to the tracking and logging forum [webmasterworld.com] for very specific questions like this to see if anyone there can help you out.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Sometimes it's not about Google. Really. :) AWStats is an open source log analyzer.

Oops! Still chuckling out loud over this one. I think my face may actually be red too. Can't tell for sure.

Thanks for setting me straight eWhisper. ;)

AWA