Advert Tracking - Order Process Editing

[stusys]

Hi there,

I have been asked to provide an 'Ad Tracker' for a client in regard to his Actinic website.

He is keen to use Google Keywords and other advertising sources, and he wants to be able to track how how many of these click throughs actually order... So in essence, I need to capture where they come in etc, which I have done via ASP and the headers information, and stored in a database table.

I was just wondering if anyone has edited any of the ordering process... I would need to capture the order amount and where the client has come from (i.e. www.awareunderwear.com?google or www.awareunderwear.com?soccernet for example)...

I was thinking that I would create a cookie from the ASP code, read this cookie in from the Perl order processing part (if no cookie, assume they haven't come from an advertised source) and write out the order amount and cookie information to a database table...

Then obviously query these tables later to determine the stats...

Was just wondering if anyone has any idea how to do the Perl side of things? and if there was an easier way within Actinic to do this?

Hope that was all clear!

Thanks
Stu

[DaveT]

Why don't you just use the built in referrer script?

With Actinic comes a file called rs00000x.pl depending on your script id which can be called as a string:

http://www.YOUR.URL/cgi-bin/rs000001...TRACKING-CODE&
DESTINATION=YOUR-ACTINIC-LANDING-PAGE.html
&PATH=%2Fdocs%2Fwww.YOUR.URL%2Facatalog%2F&BASEURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.YOUR.URL%2Facatalog

When called this sets a cookie in the browser which then appears as the 3rd user definable field in a subsequent order. Dead easy.

I use .htaccess to provide shortcuts so that I give the published URL as, for example:

www.johnsons-seeds.com/delia-patios

which redirects to the full URL - try it.

See the Advanced User Guide for full instructions.

[stusys]

Thanks for the help! definately will try that!!!!

I have a feeling that this script will only get me so far... I want to be able to show the client (in web form ideally) the amount of people coming from a particular place and the amount of people who order... So they can decide where best to spend their money on advertising... Basically showing who order and who don't...

They currently download the orders, so this is something I am not in control of...

Stu

[DaveT]

Well, you could easily write a report in Access that would extract a list of orders with this tracking code added.

It gets saved in the Orders table and if you want any help to do that I'll help you see how.

Furthermore, if your hosting supports Access data access you could connect a Web Form to the uploaded database or a subsection of it, and run your queries. Anyway maybe that's a bit much but you get the point.

[Mike Hughes]

You shouldn't need to worry about the perl side of things.

The standard way of doing tracking scripts is to embed an image on all your pages that gets called from the script area. The script then drops a cookie onto the visitors browser.

there are already plenty of scripts to do this kind of thing. Hotscripts is a good starting place or look at this example: http://www.roi-tracking-pro.com/index.html . I haven't tried it but for $29 you can't go far wrong (is PHP though rather than ASP).

Mike

[stusys]

Hi Dave,

I don't have access to the orders database, as this is done by the client... Unless your saying that the orders are stored in a database prior to download?

Hey Olderscot,
I'll definately take a look at that script, although not 100% sure how it will integrate into the ordering process of actinic...

thanks for the help guys...

Stu