Posted by Steve Nyhof on 19 November 2009 | 83 Comments
Just to be clear, this topic is on tracking visitors who convert. Use Google Analytics to test and learn more about the behavior of your site visitors. For most reseller or affiliate sites, tracking must be included in the URL because the main site is outside your control, hosted by someone else, or the company you work for. Other codes can also be sent to alter the page source or call up another template altogether. That's another topic.
There are three typical methods of tracking types:
- A URL attached tracking code sent to the page
- A tracking code hard-coded into the site or page
- A script that can track the referring url
This is a sample url with a tracking code attached...
http://landingpages.ws/?t=mytrackingcodename
The page it is calling up has a script (code) that searches the url for any extra code attached to the url. If one exists, gets the code and passes it, typically to a hidden form input field which posts the value in the url again and carried to the next page.
During this page load, the script can send the tracking code to a company database and/or your autoresponder system database, like aweber.com.
Another way for tracking to be carried to a page is inside a forward. I say inside because it helps to understand what it is doing. A forwarded domain is a different domain name used to call up the real domain name.
Example: I could setup a forward domain name called:
http://mylandingsite.com
Inside that domain name is a storage area which holds:
http://landingpages.ws/?t=mytrackingcodename
In an article or press release you can add a link called http://mylandingsite.com. When someone clicks on it, it will tell the storage domain (forward) to go to work, therefore the site that shows up is http://landingpages.ws/?t=mytrackingcodename.
This is useful for calling up landing pages that do not belong to you and you want to hide the tracking code. This is also useful to find out where a lead came from. If from a specific article or press release. It does not tell where they signed in at.
Company's like google do not allow the use of forwards, and therefore you must at least own your domain name for PPC.
Hard-coding the tracking into the page
Forms in a landing page make use of tracking codes by hard-coding them into the page and carried, typically to a hidden form input field which posts the value in the url and carried to the next page.
During this page load, the script can send the tracking code to a company database and/or your autoresponder system database, like aweber.com.
When hard-coding a page, how do you know where the lead came from? This is a good question and needs to be answered. It's in knowing these things that we learn where to divert our attention to do better.
When you first get started, you might make use of the tracking in the url. However, as you continue to create more keyword specific landing pages, you will begin to use specific page urls in your articles, press releases, twitter and even ppc.
Let me explain. Are you currently using one landing page, website or blog to send people to? Why are you limiting your relevancy?
You might write an article about topic one, and send the prospects to landing page one. That works because the topics are relevant. But then you write an article about topic two and send prospects to landing page one. Not relevant.
I believe that you should be creating a landing page that fits the topic of the article. Maybe your article is about financing, you would send them to the landing page about financing.
That's nice if you have one article and one landing page, but what if I have four articles? Then it is more difficult to know where the prospect came from, but you would know that they came from one of the four articles. Loosing touch.
Even tracking by url can get complex if you want to know the exact article the lead came from. In that case, you would have to add a unique tracking code to every article you wrote. A good idea, but a lot to keep records on. And, if you wanted to hide the tracking code, you would have to purchase a domain to forward on each article. That would cost a lot of money and headaches over a short time.
What is the tracking for? To know where the lead came from. Is there an alternative? Yes, and you don't need to do anything, our system does it for you.
With our landing page system, both options are available at the same time.
One thing I have been working on is the referring url javascript. Because landing pages are now more just a glorified website with all the necessary pages that websites include, your landing page site can now be indexed and liked by google and other search engines.
While you might be using your landing page specifically for PPC, our landing page sites double for SEO. Our landing pages are designed with specific fields to allow the site owner to add the appropriate title tags and description on a per page bases, to specifically target SEO.
The more you can build each page of your landing page site to target SEO the better google likes it, even for PPC.
One of the things that you loose with pursuing SEO with landing pages is where you want to know where a lead comes from; you cannot add a tracking code to the url if you are not in control of the sites server.
Well, the script I put together can now get the referring url from the page the person came from. So if you are found in the google listings, you now can know the url from the referring site, even from search engines.
However, this is not a guaranteed method to get the url because their are some browsers that either block this script or have a firewall that would prevent it. Nevertheless, it is more than most will get with a standard website.
But I didn't want to stop there. I wanted to make sure that if someone wants to use a tracking code they can do that also. You can build in a tracking code for each page so you know where a lead signed in at, but if the referring url had an attached tracking code, like for PPC, it will pass that also.
I have added a custom field to the aweber system to save this info. Again, it doesn't matter if you pass the tracking code or not, the system will get what ever you use for your information, keeping you more informed on how your site is performing.
The script is also smart. When a user comes to your site, a cookie is saved to the users computer to remember where they came from. Then even if the user clicks on different pages on your site and then signs up, the script will still pass the url from where they came from, not another page on your website.
