Conversion Tracking with w3roi
This guide will explain how w3roi tracks clicks, leads and sales on your website, then show you step-by-step how to get set up to track your first advertising campaign.
How w3roi tracks your online advertising
w3roi tracks the clicks on your advertisements, the sales and leads occurring on your website, and ties the two together to provide detailed reports of the effectiveness of your online advertising.
Clicks are tracked in one of two ways. When you create a new ad campaign through w3roi's Setup New Campaign wizard, you're given two choices of linking code: redirect-based tracking or javascript-based tracking.
When you choose redirect-based tracking, you are given a URL on your custom w3roi site (yourname.w3roi.com) to link your advertisement to. When someone clicks on the link, w3roi records the visitor details, referring page, and any search keywords used, and marks which advertisement this click came from. The visitor is then instantly redirected to the destination URL -- the page on your website you wanted the banner to link to.
When you choose javascript-based tracking, you are given a URL on your own domain with a special code attached to the end of the URL. It looks something like this: http://www.example.com/landingpage.html?w3source=123. To track clicks on your banner leading to this page, you must install the "Landing Page Code", a bit of JavaScript we give you to paste into your webpage. This JavaScript runs when the page loads, and looks at the URL. If it contains the extra code we added to the URL, "?w3source=xxx", it sends the visitor data, referrer and search keywords back to w3roi and notes that banner 123 was the source of the visit to your site.
In both cases, a cookie is then placed on the visitor's browser with information tying that person to the banner click that was recorded.
Hopefully, the visitor that clicked your ad eventually reaches your goal — either filling out a form or making a purchase. On the page the visitor sees immediately after completing that action, you've added the "Conversion Tracking Code", another bit of JavaScript you pasted into your page. This code sends back to w3roi the type of action that took place, the value of the action (such as the amount of a sale) and optionally a reference ID. It also reads the cookie that was set in the browser up to 90 days earlier and tells w3roi which ad that visitor clicked. Now we can tell you what banner resulted in a lead or sale for your website.
Installing the Landing Page Code
The benefit of JavaScript-based tracking is that your ads link to a URL on your own site. In the unlikely event that w3roi were to go offline, your visitors would still reach your landing page when clicking on an ad. And it makes the load time a fraction of a second longer for the visitor since there's no redirect in between clicking the ad and reaching your website.
In order to use JavaScript-based tracking you have to add the Landing Page Code to any webpage you might use as the destination of an advertisement. You can either add it to those specific pages, or add it to your entire website if you use some kind of CMS or templating system. It's OK if the code is on pages you won't be advertising.
To get the Landing Page Code, choose "Landing Page Code" in the "Setup" menu of w3roi. Then copy the code from the text box. Open your webpage source files in your favorite text or HTML editor, and paste the code before the
