Originally I was pointing all of my google ads to just my plain URL: http://www.example.com Recently, I have decided not to rely on my customers telling me in their signup form "where did you hear about us", and decided I wanted to track where they clicked from (google, oher sites, etc.) and what keyword they searched with. So I wrote a very simple cgi script, conv.cgi, and pointed my ads to this URL instead: http://example.com/cgi-bin/conv.cgi?site=google&campaign=campaign1 conv.cgi is extremely simple - all it does is set three cookies - one for each of the two variables you see in the URI above, and one for the current date/time, and then after setting those three cookies, it does a redirect to my home page. Easy. Set three cookies, then redirect. I tested it, and it works. The problem is, my conversions have gone way down since putting it in place. I am still getting a lot of clicks, but no customers. So I wonder: - is my method, pointing my ad to a cgi script, which sets some cookies and then redirects, a good one ? Is this what everyone does, pretty much ? Is this the good-old-standby way of doing it ? - does this method not work for some people ? Is it possible that some browsers/platforms are not redirecting them through correctly ? I guess I am wondering if I am crazy, and everything is fine, or if there really is some connecction between implementing this and having a downturn in conversions... Thanks. All comments appreciated.
You could always use your regular old page like before and run some log analysis on thier IP address to pull the referer out of your logs or something. I think that solution is somewhere between your old way and new way, but doesn't give you campaign tracking.