I'm trying to make a tracking system for my adwords campaign to get specific conversion data. I've got a system that saves the referer url for my visitors and it appears that I can get the user search query from that. However I also want to get what keywords made my add show up for them before they clicked. From my research I thought google was supposed to append these as arguments and as such I could use a _GET[gkw] to get them but this isn't giving me the keywords. Anyone have experience with this and know what format it comes in as?
I know but I want to do it myself because I need to convert the keywords into tracking ids for the affiliate program just got another click and it came in with this url ?gclid=CKCHrKynho8CFQzclAodMx0huw so that paramater means nothing to me
just add variable to the end of your destination url in your adwords ad for each ad you want to track, e.g. Ad1 - dest url = www.widgets.com?kw={keyword}&g=1&ad=1 Ad2 dest url = www.widgets.com?kw={keyword}&g=1&ad=2 where kw= the keyword that triggered the ad (note: not necessarily the user search query) g = adwords group ad= ad version You can then grab these in a php (or whatever) script and store is a database alongside your referrer data. If you are an affiliate and want to track this through to your network you can assign each database row a unique id and then pass that id as a subid to your affiliate network - that way you can track back commissions to: actual keyword searched keyword that triggered the ad ad group and actual version of ad that was displayed and resulted in a click
Thanks golles this is pretty much what I ended up doing. Originally I thought that google could do this for you in adwords but I suppose not. Hooray for typing lots lol. Maybe one day I'll make an autocompleter and package all this stuff up and make it nicely interfaced and sell it.