Tracking Conversions using Redirects

I've decided I need to improve my analytics on which traffic converts for me.

I have previously tried event tracking using Google Analytics which works OK for tracking clicks, although I found the results were not tallying with my affiliate accounts.

What I would really like is the ability to track not only the number of clicks for each ad, but which visitors are clicking ads - so I have a better idea of which search keywords are producing conversions.

I've noticed some people link to pages which redirect to their affiliate landing pages. I'm guessing they can then use the stats on those pages to record 'conversions' in analytics?

Can anyone give me any ideas on the best way to do this?

Not sure if you mean conversions on your site, ie clicking through an affiliate link, or conversions once the visitor gets to the merchant, ie signing up. If the former then the goal setting part of Google Analytics combined with the funnel visualization might be able to help. If you set up the redirect page as your goal and then follow the user as to how they reach that goal you might get some information. If you then use campaigns at the merchant level in conjunction those redirect pages you can track the signup conversions a bit better also.

A good site to get more out of Google Analytics is Justin Cutroni's over at http://www.cutroni.com.

Hope that makes sense, I just wasn't 100% sure whether you were looking for just information about visitors on your site or once they clicked the affiliate link and went to the merchant. I'd love to know if people have easier ways to achieve the same thing!

If you are looking for the following process:

click from your website, tracked through to casino website, track if that click converted to a player - it is not possible with most affiliate programs.

Some affiliate programs will let you pass through a dynamic variable at the end of the URL say "click1000111" (and next time when a visitor comes to your website, you might want to call that visitor cilck1000111) through to the casino, and then report if that click became a player.

I did this for a couple of advertiser websites - what it was able to tell me was - which sources of my traffic was converting best, and where I should be spending most of my money too.

Thanks. It would be great to be able to track actual conversions (sign-ups) but I recognize that isn't going to be easy.

I'll try to explain myself better:- what I'd really like to be able to do is track clicks in a way that I can see where they have come from. If I set clicks up in event tracking in Google Analytics, it tells me how many clicks per day each link gets (although I found it inaccurate). However, it doesn't tell me where those users who clicked the ads came from, unless I've missed something.

If I'm getting 100 visits a day for a keyword, but none of them are clicking my affiliate links, obviously that is less valuable than a keyword that gets 10 visits a day but has a 10% CTR.

If I can work out which traffic is converting best, I can concentrate my efforts on it.

Ok so what you want to do is track your referering URLs.

I'll track and explain what I did, but my explanation could be a little disjointed!

I wrote something in PHP. Everytime someone entered the website, I would create a unique PHP session variable out of that hit and store information such as the URL they came from, their IP Address, Time, session variable. I would also insert these details into the database.

As the user browses the site, the session variable goes everywhere with them. When they click on a link they have to go through an /out.php which tracks what casino link they have clicked. Within the out.php I grab the casino link they clicked, and store that in the database in the same row as the users other details.