Tracking Online Advertising
With so many projects “on the go” to promote the average law firm web site (even in small offices), the prospect of tracking online advertising’s true impact can sometimes be intimidating.
Do you really know if that press release converted to website traffic? How about your PPC campaign? Can you translate your paid advertising expense into returned investment?
Today, a colleague and I discussed how to easily track the click-throughs to a lawyer’s website from efforts like press releases, banner ads and even PPC. Assuming your website has some sort of traffic reporting package applied so you can see your visits & pageviews, the answer is simple: use a string variable. Still sound difficult? Read on…
If you click on a link and arrive at the URL www.someurl.com, the owner of that website sees it in their traffic report as a visit and a pageview. If the link pointed to that website has an additional (transparent) identifier in the URL, like www.someurl.com/?id=ad1, that visit and pageview will show in the same traffic report, but broken out from the rest of your traffic. The key is putting that string variable – the ?id=ad1, or ?id=ad2, or ?id=pr1, etc. – at the end of your link’s URL. Test it first, of course, because there are some websites that will have a problem with this, but a majority of the time, this variable will be transparent to the end-user and have no consequence on the way your site is displayed. By including those variables in your advertising’s links & watching your traffic report for those unique markers to show up, you’ll be able to track the incoming traffic unique to that ad campaign. What’s great is that it’s up to you to determine what those tracking IDs will be… as long as you test how your site will react to a variable like this, there’s usually no other interaction with your IT team required. You supply the unique URL to the advertising publisher and watch for it on the website’s traffic report.
An example:
Normally, I’d just send someone to www.hotelreservations.cc for a good deal on a hotel room. If, instead, I make sure that link URL is coded with a string variable – ?id=casedetails – I can send traffic to that site that tracks back to this blog post.
Mouse over this link to see what this looks like Hotel Reservations
From this point forward, the owner of HotelReservations.cc will know when people come from this blog post, because he will see the variable casedetails on the site’s traffic report. From here, advanced ROI calculation is possible.
Hope this helps – this is more a push in the right direction than an exhaustive instructional. And you didn’t even have to talk to your IT guys!
Written by jclayc on July 15th, 2008 with
2 comments.
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#1. July 25th, 2008, at 9:06 AM.
i have found landing pages to be effective as well. with landing pages we can also taylor the sales message even further depending on what venue the visitor or campaign the visitor came from.
so, for example, your PPC ad for a specific product can go to a page where you have a special promotion or sales pitch
this page should be unavailable via the normal navigation of your site so you can be sure that any traffic there came from your campaign.