Tracking Your Advertising Results

It is important to track your Internet advertising results. With many sites going secure (https://) these sites will not show up in your Google Analytics if your site is not secure. Thus you have to rely on their reports of users accessing your information and being sent to your site.

Using a query is the best way to track your incoming referrals. Change your link used by the place you advertised to this form - assuming the website was Construction Zone.

http://www.example.com/?czone

You can then search your Google Analytics for czone and find their referrals. If there are multiple sites to track, consider using a code with a unique sequence that can be searched on Google Analytics to see them all at once. An example could be:

http://www.example.com/?advqzqw-czone

Searching for advqzqw will pull up all the places you advertised at one time.

You may be sending your users to your profile page on a site where you advertise. You probably have no way to know how many you sent compared to how many they generated.

When you host data at an outside site - specs, CAD or BIM objects - you can track the number of users you send to that site. This will allow you to evaluate their performance in bringing users to your data as compared users you sent to your data.

While the article below discusses tracking downloads, the same code can be used to track outbound referrals to places hosting your data. I prefer using an onmousedown javascript action rather than an onclick event as I have found it to be more accurate. A close look at Google search results shows Google using a onmousedown tracking method. Your web designer can easily add this code to your website.

https://www.blastanalytics.com/blog/how-to-track-downloads-in-google-analytics

I use the same type of code embedded in the 4specs link to track all outbound referrals. I prefer to use a page measure rather than an event as it is one less place to check in Google Analytics. I use a link similar to:

<a href="http://www.example.com/data/XX.html" target="_blank" onmousedown="_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/czone']);">Visit Construction Zone</a> for our specs

Feedback, comments and suggestions always appreciated.

Colin

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Colin Gilboy
Publisher - 4specs
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