Google Adwords Referrer

Hello
We are running a Google adwords campaign through a third party company
who specialize in these campaigns. A report from this company says I
have had so many thousand impressions and so many thousand click thrus
to our site via the ads. We are not seeing anything like the activity
in our log files that the company says has taken place.

My question is to those of you who have direct experience of running
an Adwords campaign.
"Do your log files record anything in the referrer field which allows
you to clearly identify a visitor from a sponsored ad click?"

Thanks to everyone.

Charlie wrote:

We are running a Google adwords campaign through a third party company
who specialize in these campaigns. A report from this company says I
have had so many thousand impressions and so many thousand click thrus
to our site via the ads. We are not seeing anything like the activity
in our log files that the company says has taken place.

My question is to those of you who have direct experience of running
an Adwords campaign.
"Do your log files record anything in the referrer field which allows
you to clearly identify a visitor from a sponsored ad click?"

Create special pages as target for Adword like adword-<campaign name>.htm

--
Nico Schuyt
http://www.nicoschuyt.nl/

Charlie <> wrote:

Hello
We are running a Google adwords campaign through a third party company
who specialize in these campaigns. A report from this company says I
have had so many thousand impressions and so many thousand click thrus
to our site via the ads. We are not seeing anything like the activity
in our log files that the company says has taken place.

My question is to those of you who have direct experience of running
an Adwords campaign.
"Do your log files record anything in the referrer field which allows
you to clearly identify a visitor from a sponsored ad click?"

The easiest way to monitor it is to set the link in the adwords ad to
something that is trackable (and not linked from somewhere else),
rather than directly to the specific site or page you want to link to.

For example in my adwords I have three campaigns targeted to three
different countries. Each has multiple ads targeting different
products. When someone clicks on one of these ads I can tell from my
logfiles which country campaign and which ad. The file all these ads
link to is actually a script which then redirects to the appropriate
page (an example of this could be something along the lines of
http://www.example.com/adwords.php?cam=us&ad=foo)

A quick look at my log files also reveals that Google appears to ad some
sort of tracking code themselves to the end of the url eg
&gclid=COWCioH49oICFSEzSQodC2cuvA . I also have Google Analytics on
this particular site so it's possible that this is something to do with
Analytics rather than Adwords but I'm not 100% sure about this. If it
is an Adwords thing then you could parse your logs for this info.

--
Chris Hope | www.electrictoolbox.com | www.linuxcdmall.com

On Wed, 01 Feb 2006 22:45:45 +1300, Chris Hope
<blackhole (AT) electrictoolbox (DOT) com> wrote:

The easiest way to monitor it is to set the link in the adwords ad to
something that is trackable (and not linked from somewhere else),
rather than directly to the specific site or page you want to link to.

For example in my adwords I have three campaigns targeted to three
different countries. Each has multiple ads targeting different
products. When someone clicks on one of these ads I can tell from my
logfiles which country campaign and which ad. The file all these ads
link to is actually a script which then redirects to the appropriate
page (an example of this could be something along the lines of
http://www.example.com/adwords.php?cam=us&ad=foo)

A quick look at my log files also reveals that Google appears to ad some
sort of tracking code themselves to the end of the url eg
&gclid=COWCioH49oICFSEzSQodC2cuvA . I also have Google Analytics on
this particular site so it's possible that this is something to do with
Analytics rather than Adwords but I'm not 100% sure about this. If it
is an Adwords thing then you could parse your logs for this info.

Hi Chris
The trial Adwords campaign has just ended. Essentially for us the
problem is the company say that their campaign has been effective and
got 1,700 clicks to our site but our logs for the period concerned do
not show anything like this figure but more like 200 at best. The
total number of visits by Google is only 520 for the month concerned
(which is why we are concerned by the discrepancy) and from some of
those Google visits we do actually have organic listings.

We appreciate your time and help Chris,we just thought our logs would
concur to within reason with what they say we have had from the
campaign. Maybe something has been lost in the translation?

Thanks again Chris, we need to go back to them to see what they say
now.

On Wed, 01 Feb 2006 10:31:01 +0100, Charlie wrote:

My question is to those of you who have direct experience of running
an Adwords campaign.
"Do your log files record anything in the referrer field which allows
you to clearly identify a visitor from a sponsored ad click?"

AFAIR they look exactly as any visitor from regular Google search - unless
you will set a special url as a target; that's what I did. AdWords
visitors url had &adword=google1 parameter (google2, 3 and so on to
differentiate between channels or how is it called) - this was logged, but
the to avoid any duplicate content penalties visitors were 301 redirected
to the normal page.

Best,
Borek
--
http://www.chembuddy.com/?left=pH-ca...right=pH-scale
http://www.chembuddy.com/?left=BATE&right=pH-calculator

On Wed, 01 Feb 2006 11:23:58 +0100, Charlie wrote:

The trial Adwords campaign has just ended. Essentially for us the
problem is the company say that their campaign has been effective and
got 1,700 clicks to our site but our logs for the period concerned do
not show anything like this figure but more like 200 at best. The
total number of visits by Google is only 520 for the month concerned
(which is why we are concerned by the discrepancy) and from some of
those Google visits we do actually have organic listings.

Too large difference IMHO. There are always some unlogged referrer strings
(some don't like to be traced and conffigure their browsers to not send
this information), so part of the visitors will be not recognized, but
even without organic searches 1700:520 sounds fishy to me.

Yesterday only about 13% of my visitors had referrers string switched off,
so I don't know where did they get from. 1700 -13% still leaves about 1500
visitors you should see as coming from Google.

Best,
Borek
--
http://www.chembuddy.com/?left=pH-ca...right=pH-scale
http://www.chembuddy.com/?left=BATE&right=pH-calculator

On Wed, 01 Feb 2006 12:02:09 +0100, Borek
<m.borkowski (AT) delete (DOT) chembuddy.these.com.parts> wrote:

On Wed, 01 Feb 2006 11:23:58 +0100, Charlie wrote:

The trial Adwords campaign has just ended. Essentially for us the
problem is the company say that their campaign has been effective and
got 1,700 clicks to our site but our logs for the period concerned do
not show anything like this figure but more like 200 at best. The
total number of visits by Google is only 520 for the month concerned
(which is why we are concerned by the discrepancy) and from some of
those Google visits we do actually have organic listings.

Too large difference IMHO. There are always some unlogged referrer strings
(some don't like to be traced and conffigure their browsers to not send
this information), so part of the visitors will be not recognized, but
even without organic searches 1700:520 sounds fishy to me.

Yesterday only about 13% of my visitors had referrers string switched off,
so I don't know where did they get from. 1700 -13% still leaves about 1500
visitors you should see as coming from Google.

Best,
Borek

Thanks Borek, we had overlooked unlogged referrer strings but even so
it is still a big difference between visitor accounts.
Not being experts in this field we put trust into a company we
believed would help sales but maybe it was a mistake.
Thanks for your help

Charlie

On Wed, 01 Feb 2006 09:31:01 +0000, Charlie <> wrote:

Hello
We are running a Google adwords campaign through a third party company
who specialize in these campaigns. A report from this company says I
have had so many thousand impressions and so many thousand click thrus
to our site via the ads. We are not seeing anything like the activity
in our log files that the company says has taken place.

My question is to those of you who have direct experience of running
an Adwords campaign.
"Do your log files record anything in the referrer field which allows
you to clearly identify a visitor from a sponsored ad click?"

Thanks to everyone.

There's some stuff you might want to read and a link to some folk you
might want to talk to at

http://www.kruse.co.uk/ppc-fraud.htm, just one of my many helpful
pages. Have a talk to the fraud people because they'll be more up to
speed than we are. Probably.

BB
--
http://www.crystal-liaison.com/willow-tree/index.html kruse (AT) crystal-liaison (DOT) com
Gifty! Shiny! Arty! BB!

On Wed, 01 Feb 2006 12:40:33 GMT, Big Bill <kruse (AT) cityscape (DOT) co.uk>
wrote:

On Wed, 01 Feb 2006 09:31:01 +0000, Charlie <> wrote:

Hello
We are running a Google adwords campaign through a third party company
who specialize in these campaigns. A report from this company says I
have had so many thousand impressions and so many thousand click thrus
to our site via the ads. We are not seeing anything like the activity
in our log files that the company says has taken place.

My question is to those of you who have direct experience of running
an Adwords campaign.
"Do your log files record anything in the referrer field which allows
you to clearly identify a visitor from a sponsored ad click?"

Thanks to everyone.

There's some stuff you might want to read and a link to some folk you
might want to talk to at

http://www.kruse.co.uk/ppc-fraud.htm, just one of my many helpful
pages. Have a talk to the fraud people because they'll be more up to
speed than we are. Probably.

BB
Thanks Bill, an interesting read no doubt.

Charlie