Tracking subscriptions originating from Google Adwords campaigns

Question

Hi,

We'd like to implement a tracking system that logs which trial version signups to our website are originating from which google adwords campaign.

I know that theres a glcid parameter if auto-tagging is enabled. But how can I reverse-lookup some info on the gclid that was used? For example, it would be very useful to know the search term or the campaign name.

Thanks,

Adrian

Edit: We already have Google Analytics, but regular analytics goals just don't suffice since our application is multi-user and multi- subdomain enabled and often times the full version isnt even bought from the same user or even computer as the originating google adword click.

I'm looking for a way to merge the information from my software (events like "user signed up because of an adwords campaign and his account was upgraded to the full version 30 days later") with information from google analytics ("user came from this campaign")?

Answer 1

Google analytics will do this for you: see http://www.google.com/analytics/. It's free and does conversion tracking which is the marketing term for what you're asking.

Answer 2

In case someone else has the same question and finds this page: After fuerther investigation, I've come to the conclusion that a reverse-lookup of the gclid parameter does not seem to be possible. That's why I'll simply use a different destination url for each keyword combination on adwords and embed a keyword id into the landing page url. It's a bit of hassle, but it looks like the most stable and simple solution.

Answer 3

The easiest way to pass the keywords to your site is to append utm_* tags to your landing page URLs.

Google has a tool that you can use to append the parameters: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578. Once you have the basic format, you can dynamically inject the campaign, ad group and keywords into the URL, which you can store as part of your app's user account data. That way you can attribute the original source of the account, even if the upgrade/purchase happens on a different machine.