23 replies to this topic

[Googlewhacked]

As for the robots.txt dilemma, you could also try using the META tag to control this.

Check out Free CGI's META Tags Reference. The last entry on the page talks about how to create the tag correctly.

HTH!

[websage]

Websage,



Yikes, that's a scary thought. I wasn't aware of that. Which engines are those? Any ideas on how else to make sure that they don't spider the landing page?

Cheers,

Lydia

I am not sure if this helps always but having the landing pages in a directory whose name starts with underscore, i.e. www.site.com/_landingpages/promo1.html might be an alternative solution.

For more on robots.txt go to http://www.robotstxt.../wc/robots.html

[Jill]

Lydia...STOP! You don't need special landing pages for ConversionRuler.

I am a heavy CR user and know a bit about it.

Assuming you already have a Web site, you simply place your javascript code on the pages you already have.

You have 2 kinds of pages with ConversionRuler. The landing page is any page that the tracking link leads someone to. This could be your home page, for instance, or it could be a specific product page.

For example, one of my landing pages is my Nitty-gritty sales letter page. I put the landing page tracking code there.

Then when someone places an order, they are taken to a thank you page. This page needs the other code that CR gives you (I forget what they call these types of pages...maybe an action page?)

That's all you need to do.

The hard part, however, is setting up the tracking links. You can have multiple tracking links to ONE landing page.

You should probably read my Conversion Ruler review before going any further.

Let me know if you have any questions. Also, the folks at CR will also be happy to explain more stuff to you, I'm sure.

Jill

[Lydia]

Hello everyone,

Thank you all so much for the insight, and Jill, I'm really thankful about your experience with Conversion Ruler. It's just that I had read their instructions, and seemed to me that the landing pages were needed, but it makes more sense now. !

Jill, the Web site where I'll install CR doesn't have a call-to-action page, as it doesn't have a shopping cart. The closest thing to that is a page where there is a form where visitors can inquire more about the products. I guess I can put the "second bit" of code in there. Does that make sense?

As far as the tracking links: are those the URLs with the query string, such as:

www.mysite.com/?cl=gadwords, etc?

Thanks again to everyone,

Lydia

Edited by Lydia, 29 October 2003 - 09:20 PM.

[Jill]

Lydia,

You'd put the code on the page the user gets to *after* they fill out the form. Then you can track where people came from who filled out the form, and if they came from a search engine ad, what keywords they used.

Your tracking links can't be just anything with conversion ruler. You have to create them in the specific coding that CR specifies.

Your example would not work: www.mysite.com/?cl=gadwords, etc?

You have only certain codes you can add. The first is C1 which is your category. Then you have another field which is called "source" and another field called "segment."

Say you have a google adwords ad pointing to your home page, that shows up when someone uses the keyword phrase pink widgets.

Your tracking URL to place on this ad at google might be something like this:

"http://www.yoursite....nt=pinkwidgets"

This would tell conversion ruler what to do and the person would get to your home page without a glitch, or without you having to create a separate page.

In your CR report, you'd have a listing of all your "Adwords" category clickthroughs (say as opposed to your email newsletter clickthroughs), and you'd see which campaign (in this case campaign1) and which keywords (pink widgets).

What's awesome about adwords right now is you can set a different tracking link for EACH keyword phrase. I went in a few weeks ago and did this for mine.

I'm posting a screen shot of my CR report for the past half hour. It shows one Google adwords clickthrough, and one clickthrough from someone who had originally clicked through to my site from newsletter 74 and apparently unsubscribed from it tonight!

Hope this helps!

Jill

Attached Images

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[Lydia]

Just a quick note to everyone,

I got ConversionRuler up and running, and it was actually quite easy. I already got clicks from my campaigns showing up on the report. Like Jill said, I didn't need to make new landing pages - which was a great relief.
Cool!

Thanks for everyone's insight,


Lydia

[Jill]

Great, Lydia!

ConversionRuler is quite confusing at first, but once you wrap your head around how it works, it's pretty easy to use. You'll find that you will continue to think of new ways and things to track. My reports have gotten better and better over the past few months because of that.

Be sure to be consistent with your links with the categories, that can be a big help for creating a nice, clean report.

What to do with your report later is of course a big question! I've got tons of data about my newsletter ads and my AdWords campaigns, and I find it quite interesting. But I haven't figured out yet how to use it to my advantage! (Just little things so far.)

Good luck with it!

Jill

[Lydia]

Hi Jill,

You might know about this, but here is something I found it to be quite cool: if you look in the Detailed Report, you see the IP address of your site visitors.
In case you haven't tried, you can go to eAmnesia.com and enter the IP address to find out more about the geographic location of your site visitors. I don't know if that is valuable info to you, but I know that for my client it is.

I am managing the Overture and AdWords account for my client, and she receives quite a few inquiries through a form in her site. So I've put the "action code" snippet on the page that is displayed after a prospect would submit the form to her. In doing so, we will monitor which listings are generating the most inquiries, and then diminish or increase the bids on our PPC campaigns accordingly.

That, in turn, will help us to fine-tune the keywords for which we'll optimize the site. After all, our interest is not to have a good ranking for a bunch of keyphrases, but just for those one that will bring us the most prospects - and the return on the PPC campaigns will give us a hint of which listings we should concentrate on.

Well, you probably know all this stuff (and may even disagree on my rationale) but it's my 2 cents worth...

Cheers,

Lydia

[Jill]

Sounds good, Lydia! I don't have much need for tracking geographical regions for my purposes, but I can see where it could come in handy.

Jill