Search Engine traffic Vs Adwords traffic

how to distinguish the traffic source?

[allcam]

My site was shown on both the Google search engine result and the Adwords listing,

Does anybody get idea how to distinguish the traffic? Is it from the search result or from Adwords?

I am unable to evaluate the ROI of my Adwords if this information is not obtained

Thanks for your comment

[DaveN]

fire adwords into a launch page on your site then drop a cookie so that you can track whether or not that surfer purchased.

DaveN

[Tor]

From Google AdWords Team:

To take advantage of tracking URLs, just place the following parameter at the end of your URL:?referrer=source.

Example:
If your URL is: www.your-domain.com, your tracking URL could be www.your-domain.com/?referrer=Google

[allcam]

Hi Tor,
That seems to be a very very useful tip.

To make it clear, do you mean adding "?referrer= ..."the URL that the Adwords point to?

[allcam]

Hi DaveN,
Sorry to disturb, can you explain a little bit further in detail?

Thanks

Allcam

[Tor]

To make it clear, do you mean adding "?referrer= ..."the URL that the Adwords point to?

No I mean: www.your-domain.com/?referrer=Google were www.your-domain.com is the URL that AdWords point to.

From Google AdWords Team:

Once you've created your tracking URLs, you can get your traffic data from your Web server logs or from third party tracking software. Your log file has an entry for each click to your site. Just count the entries where "Google" (or another source reference) appears in the referring URL.

[DaveN]

what we do is create a landing page of each advertiser, you can just have one page and use www.mysite.com/index.asp?id=adwords or www.mysite.com/index.asp?id=overture and pick up the referrer that way I just prefer www.mysite.com/adwords.asp or www.mysite.com/advert_1.asp

we also prefer to land the ad on a relevant page.

example you run a computer shop and your home page as all the specials on it, you run adwords to promote laptops, monitors, speakers, dvd recorders.

now your home does not really have all these products on it so you create clones of your home page but with the target products listed on them, if you are really clever you can sniffer the http referrer and strip out the google search string and show that exact product on your site.

once the customer lands on your site you have two options drop a cookie or use a session

cookies: so you know which customer came for adwords so if they return via bookmark or a straight URL type in you can still attribute the sale to your adwords campaign.

session variable so that if the user purchasers straight away you can record the information on the fly.

we use session vars all the time when ever a visitor hits our site we trap the referrer , and give then a unique id all this is recorded in a database we track what pages and products they looked at a if they purchased or not.

It's really useful to know not only who is sending you traffic but who's traffic is converting.

we got 1500 uniques a week from a site we paid £100 per month to advertise on and converted maybe 3 a week if we where lucky.

another site which sends us 15 uniques a week and we converted 80%
and it was a free link ;)

Google still converts the best for us.

DaveN

[ThatAdamGuy]

This all becomes more difficult, typically, when folks like myself use PPC sites to fuel affiliate program revenues, since we're not able to set a cookie-upon-sale.

Luckily, more and more affiliate programs are facilitating the use of sub-ids (Amazon will do this if you ask, for instance), and in this case Dave's idea of separate landing pages really comes in handy!

[MyWurkz]

We use a doorway page and url variables. So when visitors click through the adword banner, each keyword has its own url variable and a cookie is dropped on the visitor. We can distinguish the referring url from our server stats. (alot of free server stat programs like AWStats). But the important thing is if and when that visitor finalizes the application for the service the cookie is read and the keyword, product and campaign is entered into a database. This way we can see which keywords are converting into sales.