Traffic from ads on search engines

[grnidone]

The company I work for has put advertising on search engine results pages.

Do you all know of a way to differentiate between traffic that comes to your site from an ad and traffic that comes to your site from clicking on the result from a search engine?

Thanks in advance.
-G

[tedster]

One simple way I've used is to create a copy of your home page to use as the click-through destination. Then the page-view number for the copy tells the story.

[rcjordan]

...and/or wrap it (your home page) in a 1 pixel blank + *pixel content frame, and you don't have to worry about updates to multiple pages, but you still get a unique url for tracking purposes --handy if you have multiple campaigns.

[grnidone]

??I'm still confused.

So...how is one able to tell if those page views were as a result of the person clicking on the advertisement or from clicking on the search result?

-G

[oilman]

the only way that special page will show up in your logs is if someone came to it from the banner. It will not be linked to from anywhere in your site. It will have only one incoming link (the banner ad) and all the rest will be outgoing links as if it was the home page itself.

[eljefe3]

We use a PERL script that Jim over at Jimworld recommended. It's free and easy to use.
[dtp-aus.com ]

[grnidone]

I believe I understand what you all are saying, however, it brings up another issue.

What you are saying is to associate another url with your index page.

So, for example, [whatever.com...] and [whatever.com...]

go to essentially the same page, or at least a page that looks the same to the end user. (You need the unique page url to count visitors from the banner ad.)

I thought two urls to one page or a page with the same content is considered spam. How does one get around that issue with spiders visiting your site?

-G

[rcjordan]

>I thought two urls to one page or a page with the same content is considered spam. How does one get around that issue with spiders visiting your site?

Don't link it from anywhere in your site, it's totally free-standing, you are trying to get a "pure" count on referrals FROM the ad and you don't want anyone else to find it anyway. With no links to it, and not being submitted, it will not be spidered along with the rest of your site.

[grnidone]

Oh, Duh. It's so simple.

Thanks, everyone.

-G