Track Google/Bing Shopping as Referrer
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Is there a way to track Google & Bing Shopping referrals independent of standard Google/Bing tracking? It would be nice if we could see the difference between Google PPC, Google Organic & Google Shopping.
I notice in analytics that we get some traffic from google/ppc, some from google/organic, some from google.com/referral (not sure what this is), and some from googlebase/cse (I know this is Google shopping, but I don't think it's tracking all shopping referral visits as this).
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Hello Everyone, I thought I would update this question with a few more specifics of what I did based on David's suggestions and also some other key elements to consider that David notified me of through private message. This way, if anyone else stumbles across this post in the future, it might provide a little bit more insight.
What we did is we added the suffix to our feed URL. Instead of submitting the product URL http://www.domain.com/my-product.html, we now have the following for each feed:
Google Products:
http://www.domain.com/my-product.html?utm_source=google&utm_source=productsBing Shopping
http://www.domain.com/my-product.html?utm_source=bing&utm_source=products*Important - One of my concerns with adding these custom URL parameters was the duplicate content issue. As I was researching and trying to find out if this would eventually be counter productive to our site's SEO, David was kind enough to follow up with a private message, reminding me to make sure and go to Google Webmaster Tools>Site Configuration>Settings>Parameter Handling - And have Google ignore my new custom parameters so that it doesn't treat them as duplicate content.
I still have a question about this, as I want to make sure I get this right. if anyone can chime in and clear up the remaining question, it would be helpful. Otherwise, when I find my answers, I'll try to post them back here for more precise help on this topic.
1.) I am not a programmer, so this is not common knowledge to me. But would the parameters I list in Google's Webmaster Tool parameter handling be the following? And I should tell Google to ignore them right? Rather than letting Google decide?
A.) utm_source
B.) utm_medium -
Thanks for the tip David! Hopefully we can figure out how to work something like this in for ourselves as well. I was just hoping there was an obvious way through analytics or something like that to identify them, but I suppose we can attempt to duplicate your suggestion for ourselves. thanks again!
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We have been tracking Google and Bing shopping visits by appending some tracking code like this '?utm_source=google&utm_medium=shopping ' at the end of all the URLs we send with our feeds. If you track like this you can segment traffic from each medium (i.e., organic, shopping, cpc).
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