PPC / Traffic Tracking

by Matthew Miele

Posted: 16 years ago 17 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

Hi everyone, i need a bit of help. It looks like I need a bit of code but i have no idea what to look for.

Basically I have a landing page. Which I will send traffic to.

I want to be able to do something like

www.mylandingpage.com/id=keyword1

then the thing im promoting gets "keyword1" added on the end of the affiliate link for tracking.

This way I dont need to make a landing page for every keyword. I can just send each keyword to a different url (changing the id for each keyword)

However......I will be using double meta-refresh's and cloaking (whichever is the easiest to work with)

I hope i made myself clear.

Thanks

Matthew

#ppc #tracking #traffic

ethanmiller 16 years ago

for that you must use php scripts to redirect url this is the best way i can suggest.
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vinnylingo

16 years ago

These two links are the same product. One is hosted, the other self-hosted. Don't know if it's quite what you're looking for. But I've heard good things about it.

Prosper202 Self Hosted Apps self-hosted
Free PPC Affiliate Tracking Software | Tracking202 hosted

Both are free.

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Tirmizi

16 years ago

a very detailed help could be gotten on ihelpforum.com over there they ave allot of intreactive programers and designers ....

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joefission

16 years ago

Matthew,

Your approach is different in different environments, e.g. ASP vs. JSP vs. PHP. Although I'm a much bigger fan of JSP, PHP is more commonly supported, so here's how you would do it.

Assign the keyword to a variable.

<?XXX $id = $_GET["id"]; ?>

(Replace the "XXX" with "php" -- the board just will not parse it with php there!)

Then write that variable wherever you want it to appear, e.g.:

<title>This is my page title and here is my keyword: <?=$id?></title>

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="5;URL=http://www.yoururl.com/?id=<?=$id?>" />

Is that what you're looking for?

BTW, if register_globals is on, there's a shortcut to this, but in newer versions of PHP, the above is the recommended approach.

Shaun

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Matthew Miele

16 years ago

Shaun you are brillant!.

However i dont think its quite how I want it....

I want it like this

in my ppc account

keyword1 will be linked to destination url www.xyz.com/keyword1
keyword2 will be linked to destination url www.xyz.com/keyword2
etc

however i have only made 1 landing page. www.xyz.com

then the link to my offer will take /keyword1 and place it into the affiliate link i.e www.product.com/tid=keyword1

this way, however i decide to promote my landing page. PPC, clas ads etc All i need to do is changing the link instead of making a new landing page for every keyword / traffic source.

Also my page will be something like

Landing page -> meta refresh -> meta refresh -> offer
( i have the code for the meta refresh, its done in php)

This is so the affiliate company cannot track the refer.

Thanks again

matthew

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joefission

16 years ago

Yep, if I understand you correctly, it's the same thing. You'll still get the keyword:

<?XXX $id = $_GET["id"]; ?>

And then add that to your redirect:

www.product.com/tid=<?=$id?>

I normally just use mod_rewrite for this, but I understand your needs are a bit different.

Shaun

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Matthew Miele

16 years ago

hmmm

I dont quite understand how to use it eactly.....

Shaun, without sounding a pain, could you tell me what I would need to do in steps to set up what I want to do please.

Thank you soo much for your help

Matthew

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joefission

16 years ago

Matthew,

It's tough to be more precise because I suspect what you want is for me to say "put x in y position," but I don't have enough information to say that. Here's the best that I can do:

In your PPC account, you have display URL www.landingpage.com/coolkeyword, and destination URL landingpage.com/?id=coolkeyword At least that's what I gather from your earlier post.

So in index.php in your landingpage.com site, you extract the keyword:

<?XXX $id = $_GET["id"]; ?>

You said you had a PHP script that did the redirection, so somewhere in there you're determining which URL to redirect the request to, so your final redirection URL will look like:

www.product.com/tid=<?=$id?>

or if it's in a script, it'll probably look more like

"www.product.com/tid=" . $id

Which will result in an actual URL of www.product.com/tid=coolkeyword.

Then if you want to access "coolkeyword" at product.com, you would just go back to:

<?XXX $id = $_GET["tid"]; ?>

And then reference <?=$tid?> wherever you wanted to use coolkeyword.

Shaun

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Matthew Miele

16 years ago

AH HA!

Right,

So I make index.php using <?XXX $id = $_GET["id"]; ?> (chaing the XXX)

and im guessing the "$id = $_GET["id"]" part means....get what ever is after ?id= on the url and save it as the keyword?

So all my urls what need to be formated to be http://www.landingpage.com/?id=XXX

"you have display URL www.landingpage.com/coolkeyword"

Well as a display url it would just be landingpage.com but that doesnt matter as its only a display url ?

One last thing....since i will have landingpage.com and index.php do I have to link them in anyway to make index.php run or do its job or will it know automatically to capture the keyword on my url?

same as when I insert <?=$id?> into a url.......do I have to do anything so it knows what that actually means - go look at index.php and get the keyword - otherwise it will just be like normall text and all my "=tid" will just say "<?=$id?>"

...I hope all that makes sense.

I really appreciate your help Shaun,

Thank you

Matthew

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joefission

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Matthew Miele

Well as a display url it would just be landingpage.com but that doesnt matter as its only a display url ?

That's right -- it only matters that you have the keyword in your destination URL.

Originally Posted by Matthew Miele

One last thing....since i will have landingpage.com and index.php do I have to link them in anyway to make index.php run or do its job or will it know automatically to capture the keyword on my url?

index.php will run when someone goes to landingpage.com -- it's the default file, provided you don't have another one, e.g. index.html, specified. Just remove or rename index.html or index.htm if you have one in your root with index.php and you'll be fine.

Originally Posted by Matthew Miele

same as when I insert <?=?> into a url.......do I have to do anything so it knows what that actually means - go look at index.php and get the keyword - otherwise it will just be like normall text and all my "=tid" will just say "<?=?>"

You need to do that in each page where you want to use the id. That is, even if you grab the keyword in page 1, it ends there. Page 2 has no idea that you've grabbed the id. So if you grab the id in index.php and then your script redirects to secondpage.php, you'll need to grab the id again in secondpage.php.

Also note that this is really an oversimplification of what's going on, and there are a few more ways you could accomplish this same thing, but this is the most straightforward.

Shaun

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Matthew Miele 16 years ago

YES!!

Finally im almost there!

I didnt relise you could use php as an html file. I was making the php file with the code and also using index.html and wondering why it wasnt working. So i then copied all my html into the php file and used that instead, keeping the code ... and it worked!!

Last part of the puzzle.

Since im going through a php redirect script....how do I carry the ID across to whatever page I need it at.

It goes like this

landingpage.com -> php redirect -> php redirect -> affilate site

How do I carry across the id to the affiliate url to the second php redirect?

Regards

Matthew
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- jasonl70 16 years ago
  
  I'm curious - why the double redirects?
  
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  joefission 16 years ago
  
  The php extension signals the server that it might have to do some processing. When it encounters one, it looks for all of the php sections, processes the instructions, and then includes the results in the response that is sent to the user's browser. So yes, a php file can have php, html, javascript, etc.
  
  You'll need to pass the ID to each page, and if you look a couple of posts up, you'll see exactly how to do that.
  
  landingpage.com/index.php, get the keyword represented by "id":
  
  <?XXX $id = $_GET["id"]; ?>
  
  Pass it to the php redirect:
  
  http://www.redirectpage.com?id=<?=$id?>
  
  Pass it to the affiliate site:
  
  http://www.affiliatesite.com?id=<?=$id?>
  
  Shaun
  
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  Matthew Miele 16 years ago
  
  Ah finally, there seemed to be a small problem but all works perfectly now.
  
  When using it in links you only need to use $id and not <?=$id?>
  
  using <?=$id?> actually puts in <?= and ?> on either side of the recorded word.
  
  So I would just like to confirm this and by doing this wont make anything not function correctly.
  
  As I know nothing about php and im just using logical thinking and my html knoledge haha
  
  Thank you
  
  Matthew
  
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  joefission 16 years ago
  
  No, you need the full <?=$id?>, with opening and closing brackets -- that's what tells the server that it has some work to do. But HTML isn't processed on the server, so that only works for pages with the .php extension.
  
  Shaun
  
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  joefission 16 years ago
  
  Matthew,
  
  BTW, the opening and closing brackets are what separates php from the rest of the page content -- so if you are already inside brackets, you don't need to add them again.
  
  What I gave you is a shorthand way to print a variable inside what is otherwise HTML.
  
  Shaun
  
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  ♦ Clickbank Blogging Conduit Review Site: Grab Some Low-hanging Fruit ♦
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  masterlesssamurai 16 years ago
  
  If you want to mess with PHP, you can do what you want with some tweaking. Or an easier (yet paid) solution would be to use Lpgen which will do exactly what you are talking about. If you use Tracking202, you wont have to run all sorts of refreshes and cloaking since Tracking202 cloaks and removes the referers for you on the fly. It server side so its actually quite fast.
  
  Thanks
  
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PPC / Traffic Tracking

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