Keyword tracking with surehits

[Sonny Forelli]

Have a small project that I just replaced 2ins4less with surehits but am wondering if anyone's figured out a way to track keywords off what clicks through?

 

[Affiliati]

Here's what my SureHits contact sent over to me. I followed the instructions, set everything up correctly, but I couldn't ever find a way to view the keywords in the surehits interface. Maybe your luck will be different.

Using the custom variable:
If I were to use the custom variable to track affiliates lets say I was receiving traffic from Affiliate A and Affiliate B, etc.,

I would tag my links so that I could track which affiliates were performing the best.
For instance, say I was receiving traffic from Affiliate XYZ, I would have my click url for this affiliate go to:

mywebsite.com
Now let's say that we have the SureHits code installed on mywebsite.com and want to track affiliate performance, I need to have the Zip Code (or State) form

include which keyword generated the page visit. So, inside the <form> tag, I would create a mechanism to create a

hidden element that will be passed to the results page like this:

<input type="hidden" name="affiliate" value="XYZ" />

This can be accomplished by using server side code (asp, .net, php, etc) and javascript (which is the most difficult method).

Now, when the user goes to the results page, the affiliate variable (containing XYZ in this instance) will be available to "grab".



In the "Step 2" SureHits Installation code, there is a javascript function available called getQueryStringVariable().

What this does is allow the page to grab any variable from the query string (the part of the url after the ?).

For our instance, the query string for the following url:

http://mywebsite.com/results.asp?src=1010&zip=73013&affiliate=XYZ

would be src=1010&zipcode=73013&affiliate=XYZ
If you see the Step 2 code,

you will see:

getQueryStringVariable('statecode'),

getQueryStringVariable('zipcode')

etc, etc.

This is how we know what state or zip they are looking in, from the Query String
So, in the Step 2 code, there is a variable ni_var1=""; what we need to do to track the affiliate is change

ni_var1 = "";

TO:
ni_var1 = getQueryStringVariable('affiliate');

for our case.

 

[Sonny Forelli]

perfect thanks, figured they had some tracking parameter.

I wonder if I need to have some 'advanced' account functionality unlocked, as like you the interface is way too basic and I can't see where anything like this would show up.

 

[miketpowell]

Go to reports and choose "custom" and you can get a report will it will show the SUB IDs.

Just don't try to use 202 or something because you won't be able to judge the quality of a keyword if it's assigning a different ID to every click. There system attempts to give a quality score to any ID you start using but can't really do shit if you are passing through a unique one each time. If you do that it will just be using your entire account quality score and you won't get good data on different keywords/traffic sources.

Kudos to using something that can make you much more then 2insure4less if you can figure it out and be accountable for your own quality and have enough money to float the payout schedule.

 

[Sonny Forelli]

Go to reports and choose "custom" and you can get a report will it will show the SUB IDs.

Just don't try to use 202 or something because you won't be able to judge the quality of a keyword if it's assigning a different ID to every click. There system attempts to give a quality score to any ID you start using but can't really do shit if you are passing through a unique one each time. If you do that it will just be using your entire account quality score and you won't get good data on different keywords/traffic sources.

Kudos to using something that can make you much more then 2insure4less if you can figure it out and be accountable for your own quality and have enough money to float the payout schedule.

thanks very much! epsecially the bit about constantly dynamic ID's and their system trying to treat/decision treating these more like sub-affiliates even though they may just be keywords.

+rep