Three Ways to Track Revenue – A Comprehensive Guide
August 5th, 2008 by Joy BrazelleAs more marketers are being held accountable for their budgets, proving ROI on campaigns becomes essential. In order to track ROI, you must be able to track revenue on your Web site. This is not nearly as complicated or technically difficult (in most cases) than you may think (or have been told).
There are three ways to track revenue on your Web site:
1. Using Analytics
2. Using Search Engine tools
3. Using Both – Comparing analytics to search engine reporting
Using Analytics
Regardless of whether you are using a java script based analytics programs or analyzing your Web server logs, tracking revenue is completely possible if you have two things:
1. A unique ‘thank you’ page that displays only when a purchase is successful
2. Access to make modifications to your Web site
Without a unique page that only displays when a purchase is successful, you will always ‘over-count’ revenue. Often times, shopping carts are built using one form that posts back to itself. You can tell if this is the case because the URL does not change from one step of the checkout process to the next.
The problem with this is that you never get an accurate count of successful purchases or cart abandonment since the URL is the same. If your shopping cart is built this way, it is worth it to ask your developer to either add parameters for each step or implement a unique ‘thank you’ page.
If you don’t have access to make modifications to your Web site, you can still track revenue but it will not be as accurate as you will simply be assigning a dollar value to a goal page. Here is how it is done in Google Analytics and in ClickTracks
Log File Analytics
To track revenue using log files, you will simply have to pass the order total parameter and the dollar value of the sale into the query string of the URL. As long as your developer knows .ASP (or .ASPX) or .PHP, this should be a relatively straight-forward, quick change.
Or, you can use what is called a beacon which is an invisible image that is used to capture data that is normally not found in log files. Here is an explanation for doing this with Google Checkout.
Java Script Analytics
The beauty of java script-based analytics is that you can track anything that you want on your Web site. You just need to plan for it ahead of time, and have the ability to place custom java script on the ‘thank you’ page. Each analytics package will have a slightly different method (code) for tracking revenue. But, it should be well documented in the instruction manual. (A quick search on ‘tracking revenue in webtrends java script’ resulted in this pdf with instructions on page 15).
Using Search Engine Tools
Both Google and Yahoo generate ‘conversion tracking’ code that you can simply copy and paste onto your ‘thank you’ page. This article also has good instructions for generating the Google Conversion code. You just have to scroll down to the section ‘Using AdWords Conversion Tracking.’
Also, Nate had written a good article about the improvements that were made to the conversion tracking earlier this year.
For Yahoo conversion code, click here.
Using Both – Comparing analytics to search engine reporting
I am always an advocate of this method, using both. Without a ‘gut-check’ in place, it is way too easy to make decisions with bad data (which we mention over and over).
Understand first that the data from your analytics will likely never match the search engine data 100%. In fact, depending on the time frame that you are analyzing and several other factors, the discrepancy may be as much as 15%.
But, by tying your analytic data in with what the search engines report, you will be able to get a very comprehensive picture of what is working and what is not. And it will be clear what changes need to be made to make your PPC (and other campaign) efforts as effective as possible.
If you are new to PPC or Analytics, feel free to join us on Wednesdays this month for ‘Webinar Wednesdays.
Related posts:
