Cookies
We get asked fairly often by vendors that are new to tracking online campaigns how to create cookies so I thought it was worth a post...
First, what are they and why use them? A cookie is simply a small text file created by your website and placed on your web visitor's hard drive. Although there are other ways of doing it, cookies are the fairly standard way of tracking web visitors from click to lead. If you place a tag, which is a string of characters such as ?source=capterra, at the end of your ad link, then a cookie allows you to identify a web visitor with their incoming tag as they navigate throughout your website or later return to your website. Then when they complete an online form, the cookie will allow you to report the referring site along with the information submitted via the form.
Tracking in this way is more accurate than relying on your web logs due to the fact that logs are unable to identify the referring link for a good chunk of your web visitors - often 10-20% of them - due to variety of technical limitations.
Regarding how to implement cookies, I generally don't go down this path for the simple reason that it depends on the platform/language of your website. But here are a couple websites that provide some technical details: The Code Project and W3Schools.
I hope these help!
First, what are they and why use them? A cookie is simply a small text file created by your website and placed on your web visitor's hard drive. Although there are other ways of doing it, cookies are the fairly standard way of tracking web visitors from click to lead. If you place a tag, which is a string of characters such as ?source=capterra, at the end of your ad link, then a cookie allows you to identify a web visitor with their incoming tag as they navigate throughout your website or later return to your website. Then when they complete an online form, the cookie will allow you to report the referring site along with the information submitted via the form.
Tracking in this way is more accurate than relying on your web logs due to the fact that logs are unable to identify the referring link for a good chunk of your web visitors - often 10-20% of them - due to variety of technical limitations.
Regarding how to implement cookies, I generally don't go down this path for the simple reason that it depends on the platform/language of your website. But here are a couple websites that provide some technical details: The Code Project and W3Schools.
I hope these help!
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home