Some marketers don’t like to admit they need to track their results. Some don’t feel they need to. They say the results are too important to risk losing everything by using too much tracking. I disagree.
In the early days of the Internet, we had a lot of sites that had web pages that read like a lot of old movies. For example, Google’s homepage was a nice little box in the corner of a large screen. There were no Google Adsense ads on it, but the page read and read, and that page was the same page as the original movie. In some ways, it was a pretty good way to track.
In a similar vein, there is a lot of online tracking that goes on, but it tends to be a lot more subtle then the movie. You’ll see pages that say “click here to sign up” or “click here to learn about your privacy” or “click here to see your traffic history.
The reason I chose the homepage over the ad is because it is a little bit more organic and less spam-heavy. I have no idea why you’ve spent so much time getting Google Adsense ads to link to content, but I do have a feeling that they’re trying to get away with that.
Google has been using tracking cookies for a long time, and their goal seems to be to get your cookies as close to you as possible. They have a ton of products, services, and sites that allow tracking on their site. Some of these products and services can also be a privacy risk (such as cookies with personal information on them), so you should only use these if you have a legitimate need.
The Adsense campaign on our site also uses cookies, so you can probably find out how much of the sales on our site are from you. But the tracking is so subtle it would be really hard to notice. We definitely don’t want to use Adsense on our site to track our sales.
Cookies are a small step in the right direction, but it’s still a privacy problem. There are other products and services out there that allow tracking, but they are far less discreet.
So, how do you actually find out how much of the sales you make from your site are from you and how much are from Google Analytics? We’re not going to tell you that. The only way to make sure your sales are being made by you is by tracking them.
We’re all used to tracking websites, so that is why we don’t do it all the time, but we want to know more about the search traffic.
Again, this is the same reason we don’t track sales activity on our website. We wanted to track website sales activity, not sales activity from the Google Analytics.