How to Track Marketing to Website Sales
It’s important to be able to calculate the ROI of your marketing investment. Using web log analyzers or tools like Google analytics may help determine the traffic generated from marketing but that may only tell you the interest generated from your marketing. Being able to track your marketing to sales will allow you to accurately calculate your ROI and determine where people may be loosing interest. For instance, you may advertise a product that may generate lots of interest until potential customers view the price, realize shipping costs, get to a long form they need to fill, etc.
Passing a unique ID across the address line is a popular technique to determine what marketing was used to get to your site. For instance, if the link to your advertised product is http://www.mycoolsite.com/products.aspx?pid=100 you could add an advertising ID to the end of this URL like this: http://www.mycoolsite.com/products.aspx?pid=100&aid=44 then, using web log analyzers or Google analytics you can determine how many times this link is used when coming to your site. This link could be used on another site in a text/banner add or when sending a newsletter. Obviously you would assign a different number for each campaign and could also use a different one per site.
The problem with just using the technique above is that many customers will visit your site many times before actually making a purchase. They may initially visit your site using the advertising ID formatted link but next time they may come directly to your site. Additionally they’re final purchase may not include the product advertised. It’s important to find out sales totals generated from marketing campaigns regardless of how many times they visited or if they purchased the advertised product. I have many times seen sales generated from and advertised product that did not include the advertised product. Newsletters in particular can have this affect.
Using the technique above in conjunction with a cookie on the customer’s computer will allow better tracking of sales to marketing. Using the example link above, when the advertising ID exists in the address line, write a cookie to the customer’s computer. Then when adding products to the cart and when placing an order you can check for the existence and value of the cookie. This data can then be saved with the order and later a custom report can be generated. This depends on the user allowing the creating of cookies and keeping them longer than the current session.
A word of caution, if you have other sites linking directly to a page of yours you may not want to add additional variables in the address line. This is from an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective as most search engines will see this as duplicate content. For instance, the content on this page: http://www.mycoolsite.com/products.aspx?pid=100 and on this page http://www.mycoolsite.com/products.aspx?pid=100&aid=44 would probably be the same. To a user this is the same page, to a search engine these are usually seen as two different pages with duplicate content. The problem with this is that the search engine will probably rank each page lower by dividing up the ranking between both pages. Imagine if you were linked to from 10 different sites and the advertising ID had a different value each time. The search engines could view this as ten different pages and divide the ranking equally. The technique above works great for newsletters that are sent via email as the search engines wouldn’t look at those links like they would ones that are published on a web page. Additionally you might not be ranked for a particular product and because of that you may not care if search engines tag the content as duplicate. It’s something to keep in mind and worth checking with the person in charge of SEO prior to making any changes.