Hi,

I am a web designer that conducts PPC campaigns for many of my clients. I was wondering if some of the veterans in here could help me by making a recommendation.

I am trying to measure the results of my clients' PPC campaigns and am wondering what tools that I could be using to make my job easier and the results more useful to both myself and my client. I have the latest Urchin software on my hosting account, but that information is not very useful outside of web hits, though I am admittedly a novice and might not be using the software to its greatest potential.

Anyway, I need a solution that I can use for many clients and that is robust enough to track which keywords users came from and their conversion rates as a start.

Any info on how to evaluate these products would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Michael

Requirements:
- Ability to measure many campaigns.
-

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Michael Parker
www.gravitatedesign.com
michael@gravitatedesign.com

Web logs actually store quite a wide variety of information, including which keywords referred visitors. Standard website stats programs should be able to highlight this information for you. I have no idea how good Urchin is, but I have used some pretty suspect packages in my time, and even the lowliest of them still offers forth some very useful info.

But, if it's analytics you want to get into, I recommend using HitBox. This little service is quite slick, albeit not entirely cheap (starting at $40 USD per month, I think). But it offers a ton of information about people's habits and preferences and stuff that is quite difficult to glean out of web logs.

To run HitBox, you simply place a snippet of their code on every page you want to track and then login to your account on the HitBox website to view your analytics at any time. It's one of the best out there.

Steer clear of products like WebTrends, as these tend to be overkill for web designers. Products like these are better suited for large websites (like corporate intranets) that have a team of in-house web gurus.

Anyway, that's my $0.02. Good luck to you.

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Robin Eldred
Web Design & Internet Marketing by Apis Design
Websites that work

hello,

Here's one you might like, I'm trying it myself at the moment and it seems very good.http://www.in-stats.com/

Runs on the same principal as above with a small javascript code on each page.

they do a 15 day free trial to see if you like it, full service costs about 25 Euros per month,

Cheers


Kingsley[/url]

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http://www.fizogg.co.uk
http://www.facepaintingdesigns.co.uk

Hi,

Urchin is actually a fairly robust web analytics package.

Urchin does have a bit of a learning curve, however their is extensive documentation within the software. Many hosting companies are offering Urchin with hosting packages as WebTrends is rather costly.

To retrieve the reporting you seek do the following:

After logging in and selecting the report you'll see a "Referral" link on the left. Click on that and you'll see the following options:

Top Referrals / Top Keywords / Referral Tree / Search Engines / Referral Error

These will help you "drill down" what search engines and keywords are driving traffic to your site and you can provide your clients with this information.

Understand though that this does not breakout PPC results, it is just an aggregate of overall referral and search engine traffic. To get specific PPC results you'll need to gather the information from the PPC campaign managers or use Overture/Adwords tools.

Best of luck.

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Shark Interactive
Interactive Marketing & Technology
www.sharkinteractive.com

I have found that the Clicktracks.com software offers the most robust feature set. It also provides clickstream analysis, as well as ROI tracking. Check it out at http://www.clicktracks.com

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I definetely suggest http://www.clicktracks.com. The best part of it is that you can create very visual stats and reports to show to clients.

More informationan and a list of ROI trackers is here: http://www.roi-tracker.com

http://www.nedstatpro.com/ offers a one month free trial, and seems to be pretty comprehensive from what I ave seen so far. Prices start at 90 ukp per year (for the UK).

But in theory - it may be a little bit better not to bother with these javascript traffic monitoring add ins, and actually analyse the server logs yourself? (Not my area of expertise, but I am sure someone else can add a bit of insight in to this)....

The only drawback to using a strictly web stats program is that you won't get information like click stream.

The more advanced "analytics" packages discussed here are only for those who are really serious about the business metrics of their site. Otherwise, a stats program should give you plenty of info.

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Robin Eldred
Web Design & Internet Marketing by Apis Design
Websites that work

Try www.opentracker.net

For those that want to really get into larger analytics, that also provide very applicable info, you will want to take a look at Omniture's Site Catalyst webware. https://www.omniture.com/

Though they do the web analysis for several of the webs' "big boys" they also can take care of the smaller sites as well.

New Version 9.5 has a special add on that will allow you to correctly tell where your people are coming from (something you can use on Overture to limit the ads displaying, and produce a better CTR. We even tested this feature by using different ISP's located throughout the US and it identified 40 out of 40 correctly. The numbers also reflect what we have been able to obtain through costly surveys.

Other features allow you to track conversion of the clicks that come to your site. This will allow you to see if the clicks are really bringing cash in, and will allow you to calculate the true cost per conversion.

We should all use the tools that are provided throughout the web to develop smarter sites. Remember for E-commerce the goal is not visitors, but buyers.


Rick Saake
Online Ops Manager
http://rgj.com