Programatically track conversions with/whithout Google Analytics - SpringMVC

Question

I need to track conversions from a banner ad which will be displayed on different affiliate websites. This is not via AdWords.

Now, I read about Campaigns and Goals in Google Analytics, and I think this approach could work. But, I'm trying to find a more automatic solution, if such exists, to ease the work load on the marketing people.

The banner ad takes to a landing page, which offers the user to sign up, and after a few steps confirms signing up (conversion).

The application uses Spring MVC, and the controller on the landing page creates a cookie for the session. I was wondering if there's a way to create a cookie for Google Analytics or manipulate it (or some other way), in order to create campaigns automatically or track conversions from different affiliates, without creating a campaign for each affiliate.

Does Analytics provide such functionality via API?

Can you recommend another approach to track this information with Java on the SpringMVC Controller?

Answer 1

There's no process of 'creating' campaigns in Google Analytics or via the API. Instead, GA creates 'campaigns' for you on the fly by accepting utm variables passed in the query string of the landing page URL. (ie, utm_campaign, utm_source, utm_medium, as well as utm_content and utm_term in certain cases). The only configuration you'll need is to create custom URLs, and GA handles the rest.

In order to reliably track non-Adwords campaign referrals, you need to tag all of the incoming links with utm campaign variables; otherwise, there is no reliable way to know which click came from which campaign, ad variation, or medium. Otherwise, the only attribution you'll get is from HTTP_REFERER, when it is available (ie, only on web-based displays of your ad, but no where else). But this will prevent you from being able to drill down into the details of which ads drove conversions.

So, if your landing page is http://example.com/landing.html, and you have a CPC ad in an email advertising a discount that Bob Warehouse is sending out on his list, you'll need to set the URL for the ad to be:

http://example.com/landing.html?utm_campaign=falldiscount2010&utm_medium=email&utm_source=bobswarehouseemaillist

As far as setting up the Goal, that's a one time setup. You set the final goal URL (or head match of that URL, if its a semi-unique value), and then you can setup a funnel for the steps, so you can analyze funnel abandonment. You'll be able to drill down conversions by campaign, medium, source, content, etc, and analyze comparative conversion rates.

This tool from Google provides a guide to using campaign variables, as well as a tool for building campaign URLs: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578