Tracking Print Ad

[glasgowmike]

I only have Business Client. I am running a print ad and I want to track the unique visits from the ad to our website. Can I create a duplicate URL to our home page by way of a brochure page? Are there other suggestions?

For example, I want to have them come to www.thebead.co.uk/BEADSRUS so i can see how many visits I get from this print ad. I want it to land at our home page of www.thebead.co.uk. Is there some kind of redirect that I can do?

I understand the tracking through Google AdWords as we have that set up but I can't figure out how to track people from print responses or at least not have them blend in with every other visitor that comes organically through searching for us or typing the URL directly.

Hope this is clear

[NormanRouxel]

The Advanced Guide has an article on recording where orders come from:-

Using The Referrer Perl Script
An extra Perl file (normally called rs000001.pl – depending on your script ID) is available in the installer and is automatically uploaded to your web site. It is a way of tracking which sites customers have come through in order to reach your site. It works by creating a text string as a cookie in the customer's browser if they click on a specific type of hyperlink. If the customer places an order, the text string is then included with the order.

However this only passes the link through to completer orders. It won't tell you about non-ordering visits.

[Duncan Rounding]

http://bitly.com/ and many other URL shortening services offer tracking. On some you can even generate your own shortened URL names which you can use for campaigns.

[glasgowmike]

I think I didn't describe this correctly. I called Actinic and found out I can't make a duplicate of my index page.

I want to have a page that looks just like www.thebead.co.uk/acatalogue/index.html (named www.thebead.co.uk/offer.html), this way I can see how many people actually come to my website from the print ad. I think what I will need to do is just create a brochure page and have an image that is linked to our catalogue.

[Mike Hughes]

That's probably the easiest way to do it but not really the best one. The problem you'll have is that that visitors will often back out of a web site (meaning the page could be viewed twice by each visitor - once one the way in and again one the way out) and the search engines will pick up the page and could start sending visitors to it as well.

A better option would be to use a redirect with google analytics tracking as described here http://www.seoracle.com/google-analy...irect-tracking . This way the vistor will end up on your usual home page but you'll be able to see the number of unique vistors the ads are getting.

If you aren't using google analytics, one option would be to put a piece of javascript on the brochure page that displays an invisible image if the reffering info isn't your website. Then you can just look at the number of times the image has been displayed to see how many visitors have come the ad. You'll still need to try and stop the search engines from indexing the page though.

Something like this, modified to display an image should work.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> 
if(document.referrer.length > 0 && document.referrer.indexOf("http://www.mysite.com") != -1){ 
    document.write("you're from mysite.com") 
} else { 
    document.write("you're not from mysite.com") 
} 
</SCRIPT>

Mike