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I Have A Really Dumb Question About Making More Money With Free Tracking Methods

by Marc Rodill
6 replies
Hey Warriors,

I'm getting ready to do some marketing I need to track. And I want to test a free method that I thought was really smart.

The only problem is, I stumbled across the information about how to do it probably a week ago. And not very intelligently, I didn't save the URL.

With that said, probably someone here knows how to do this. So I'll explain the concept really quickly. If I butcher this explanation, don't hold it against me.

Basically I'm going to put several peices of content out there and see which ones get picked up. But I want to append a unique keyword to the end of my link.

For example, if I'm sending all traffic to my top level domain name, isn't there a way with PHP you can add a "php?r=xyzkeyword" (or something) to the end of your url?

You know, to track the visits, without creating a new page that redirects to another page on your site every single time, or something.

This way I can code the article, check my analytics stats, and see which coded keyword is actually getting visitors and how many.

Is anyone familiar with this method, or have a link to a website about it? I've been searching for it for a long time this morning.

Thanks,

Marc
#dumb #free #making #methods #money #question #tracking
  • Profile picture of the author Joshua Lowenthal
    Sounds like you are talking about split testing.

    As far as appending keywords, you ultimately could just send various ads to separate pages and see which pages are getting the most traffic.

    Keep it simple.
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  • Profile picture of the author Marc Rodill
    Well not exactly split testing but similar. Basically I want to submit articles to a directory. All traffic will go to the same page. So I want to uniquely code the URL inside each article, without creating a new .html file or .php file inside my cPanel that redirects to the index file for every article I write. Then if I get a spike in traffic, I'll be able to tell which article sent the traffic. My thinking is, this will make it easier to find the content publisher who re-published the article because I'll know exactly what I'm looking for.

    Hope this helps clarify my thinking,

    Marc
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    • Profile picture of the author Joshua Lowenthal
      I understand what you mean now.

      Well at least I think I do

      So you want the backlinks from your article submissions to also contain a piece of meta data that the landing page will grab and submit to a form of reporting for analytics.

      Am I correct so far?
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  • Profile picture of the author Marc Rodill
    Yeah that's exactly it. So when you actually pull up the Google Analytics, it says something like index.phpkw?=article001

    But obviously, when the visitor lands on the page, that kw string goes away. It just passes to me in my analytics account.

    Marc
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    • Profile picture of the author Joshua Lowenthal
      Ok I gotcha!

      Well in the sense you are trying to make things work, essentially you can put
      ?whatever=whatever

      after an "examplewebpage.php"

      and it doesn't really make a difference to anything other than to show that the link connected to you, basically what you are saying you need.

      Now you could always grab that meta data and process on your landing pages as well. Say if you make each keyword variable unique to the site you use you could have your landing pages cater to visitors from those specific websites.

      Something like:

      Article on ABC Directory Website
      Article on XYZ Directory Website

      You could have one landing page "Welcome-all-visitors.php"

      Now for each copy of the article on the two directory websites you could simply put the link to something like:

      "http://mysite.com/welcome-all-visitors.php?keyword=abc"
      "http://mysite.com/welcome-all-visitors.php?keyword=xyz"

      On your welcome-all-visitors.php page you could have a script that changes a line of text in your headline to either read:

      Welcome all visitors from "ABC"
      or
      Welcome all visitors from "XYZ"

      it lends some customer interactivity and connection.

      Just a thought!

      Good Luck!
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  • Profile picture of the author Marc Rodill
    Thanks, that's really smart. And it's easy. I just tested it and it pulls up. Can you hide the keyword in the address bar, or do you just have to live with it showing?

    By the way, thanks for your help on this so far. I appreciate it.

    Marc

    EDIT: I think I figured it out. Just do a header or meta refresh.
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