Hi all, I am going to be running a PPC campaign to get traffic to my website. My wesbite is a price comparison site, so eventually the user will leave my site and go to a merchant site to sign up for a particular product/service. I have a script that will track how many customers click to a particular product/merchant. But I would like to also know which keyword each customer entered into google/yahoo/msn so that I can establish which keywords are successful and which ones are not. Is there anyway to tracking the keyword that the customer entered into the search engine using PHP/mySQL? All I need is a way to get the keyword on the entry page and then I can tracking it through each page to the last page before the customer leaves to visit the merchant. Any ideas?
i think google analytic can provide you the solution or there is a tracker called slimstats, which gives a descriptive stats including queries from search engines But hotscript is another way to pick a script from thousands of scripts there
Yeah google analytic will do the job, but I wiuld rather not rely on google for my performance tracking. I don't think it would be as reliable as tracking if myself and I don't like the idea of google tracking that kind of think. They know too much about our sites as it is! I looked on hotscripts and found a couple of useful scripts, but none of them are free. I don't really want to pay for it as it is something that I should be able to code myself. I just need to get my head around how to "get" the keyword that the user is searching.
analytics is the best you can get for free...and you can also customize it and expand it way beyond what is does by default. Google already knows most things about your site, because I'm sure they bring you most of your traffic plus you are using adwords?
I think I have the answer and it seems pretty easy. You simply change the destination url in google adwords (or yahoo) to include some tracking. For example, If the keyword is widget and your landing page is http://www.stuff.com/comparewidgets The destination URL in the Adwords advert would be: http://www.stuff.com/comparewidgets?keyword=widgets You then use $keyword = $_GET['keyword']; in the script in the landing page, and you have the keyword for that user. If your customer goes to the merhcant site from the landing page, you simply add a tracking page that records the keyword and product/merchant for every user in a mysql table. If anyone is interested in this for themselves, I will let you know how I get on when I've finished it.
Yes I am using adwords and Yahoos search as well. Although I stopped using Adwords a few months ago when they had their latest price hike. They become too expensive and were unprofitable. Since then I have made many changes to by site, which hopefully "complies" more with Google's guidelines and the tracking I put in place will help me tweak, so that I am only spending on keywords that deliver a profitable return. I might actually use Analytics and compare it against my own data to test its accuracy.