I am looking to help a friend out by advertising for him on Adwords. In order for me to be recompensed I need to know the value of the sales I send him so that a commission can be calculated. Google conversion tracking should tell me (and him) when a sale has been made, but not the value of it. He has thousands of products. Is there a way to acheieve this without paying for and setting up a complex affiliate program? Thanks.
Google Analytics has that ability if you setup conversion tracking with it. You can see how much revenue is generated by any adwords campaign.
I have been told this by a number of people but - unless I am stupid - I cannot see how Google conversion tracking helps. It merely places a cookie on the person's PC who clicks on my adword ad which triggers a conversion should that same person reach the merchant's receipt page. That does not tell me the value of the sale.
Simply use a bit of htaccess and a little php. For your adwords urls, append a variable like. ?fromAdwords=1 (rewrite this with htaccess to /destination/adwords perhaps). Set a cookie on your site when the fromAdwords is 1. When a sale completes, put the value of the adwords cookie into the database. Select total amount of sales (total rev, etc) from the database where adwords=1. A few of hours work at most.
Gordon, I did not understand all of that but thanks Personally, I cannot see how anything can work that does not involve some form of complicated integration into the cart or payment processor (affiliate programs do this - although there are compatability issues sometimes). If I have 3 ads in Adwords: Buy Nike Shoes Buy Acme Shoes Buy DigitalPoint Pro Shoes Visitor comes to the merchant site (and picks up the Google cookie) through the Acme ad. He then buys a Nike pair of shoes and hits the thank-you page and a conversion is registered. All I know is that he bought something or somethingS. I am leaning toward the affiliate software solution.
You would have to use a script that would log with a cookie and then recover the cookie after the purchase has been placed, add the item id, and then store that in the database. It would depend on how compatible your shopping cart is.