Need help Tracking PPC vs Organic and respective ROI

[tjsherrill]

So I have a client who uses PPC and Organic SEO to drive traffic.  Once a user gets to the site, the most common action is to fill out a form.

I have Auto Tagging enabled in Adwords so all PPC clicks have "gclid" in the url.

I am also grabbing the Google Cookie and parsing it out to determine if the visitor is PPC or Organic.

So I have an if statement in my form code to pass PPC vs organic through the form for tracking purposes:

$url = 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

if (false !== strpos($url,'gclid'))  { ?>

Essentially this is saying:

If gclid is in the url, or if the cookie contains PPC 
set the Web field as PPC Else
Set it as Organic.

this is working about 80% of the time. I am trying to raise the accuracy.  any ideas where I might be missing some data?

thanks

[StreamlineMetrics]

You say that your solution works 80% of the time - how do you know that? Do you have any ideas for why it wouldn't work for the other 20% of the time? Here are some of my thoughts -

1. Not all of your leads will likely be generated by Google (organic or paid). Are you taking into account that visitors who come from a link on another website and fill out the form should not be tracked as Organic or PPC? It looks like your script is determining every visitor who doesn't come from AdWords should be counted as Organic, and that may be what is causing the discrepancies in your data.

2. What about visitors who come from a search on Yahoo or Bing? Are they being tracked as Organic in your script?

3. It's possible that some of your visitors have cookies and/or Google Analytics disabled so I can see that messing up your data if you are checking the GA cookie.

I can definitely understand the value in passing the source info along through your form, but it looks like your script might need a little finetuning to track more accurately. I have actually ran into similar issues before with trying to pass the source of the lead through the end of the sales funnel so I can determine which traffic sources/keywords generated conversions that resulted in sales without needing a full blown CRM and developed a free tool called Convertable which does exactly what I was looking for. If you are still having problems with your script, feel free to give it a try.

[BTeubner]

TJ,

Why send the source info through the form? Are you passing it your CRM or something?

I typically just utilize Google Analytics to track the source. You can set a custom variable with the lead's name into GA if you want to match up leads.The avantage is that you can also track other lead sources like organic, social, etc. in addition to PPC.

Of course, if you're doing really high volume, this isn't real efficient.

-Rick