Site User Tracking

A recent experience of pay per click advertising has shown the benefits of tracking customer activity from a number of sources.

If you take out some online advertising you will get built in tracking to show you clicks, cost per click and impressions, plus more stats than I have time to mention here. However what happens after users have clicked through to your site is your responsibility. Therefore as a minimum it is advisable to have a free tracking tool like Google Analytics (GA) on your site and where possible ensure that server logs are switched on and are available to you as required.

I had set up some advertising and allowed "content match", as you would assume that large companies are on the ball with who is displaying their adverts and you would hope that they are getting the best for their customers. I was wrong as it turns out.

There were several distribution partners that display adverts in directory style websites and if you actually look at these sites they have very little in common with some of the adverts they display.

The adverts I had produced were carefully worded to target specific customers including a price that should keep those looking at the lower end of the market out of the site in question.

Luckily Google Analytics clearly shows where people have come from how long they were on the site and which pages they navigate through (Document on how to find this out to follow). With an average time on the site of less than ... well zero seconds it was obvious that someone was taking advantage.

Having referred this to the advertising company, they then asked for server logs. If you are unfamiliar with these they involve thousands of line of code and look like something out of the Matrix films, but buried deep with in them is confirmation about pages opened and the time on the site.

The issue has now been referred to a fraud team. A couple of points have come out of this:

1. Make sure you have a form of site tracking on your site, even if it is an information site.
2. Review the data, especially if you have PPC advertising on the go.
3. If you think something looks suspicious do check it out and do report it to your PPC company.