Don't Get Your Web Analytics From the Same Place You Get Your Ads

I had a fellow call me this week about an email campaign which he is running for a client. The client had sent out an email blast to his list and the analytics report which the email sending company had returned did not mesh with what was being reported by the WunderCounter. Is this good or bad? Whom is he to believe?

This leads me to one of the really great reasons to use the WunderCounter. You can (and should) use it to track the success of your ads, email campaigns and marketing initiatives. Since the WunderCounter is not affiliated with the 3rd party which you are buying your services from, there is no conflict of interest in getting you an honest breakdown of your web traffic. There's no pressure to over inflate the success of your marketing initiative or even to suppress potential click fraud. It's in my best interest to get you the most accurate stats which I possibly can, because this is a service which helps you to keep other services honest.

For example, if you're paying for your ads by the click, do you trust the click reports which your ad provider sends you? How thorough are these reports? Do they drill down to the individual clicks? If not, how are you to know that there is no click fraud being perpetrated on your ads? If you are getting a breakdown by IP, can you trust it 100%? If you have been billed for fraudulent activity, how likely is your ad provider to let you know about it?

Your ad provider wants to bill you for as many clicks as possible. Your email delivery provider wants to prove to you that a very high percentage of your messages have been successfully delivered and opened. Are you really getting what you've paid for? Whom are you going to trust to tell you what really happened with the money you've spent?

Think about it. Keeping companies honest ranges from uncovering dishonest business practices to discovering sloppy accounting or oversights on their part. It's easy to track the success of your ads and emails yourself, so why not gather this info for comparison? You may be surprised at what you find.

New Feature: AdWords Tracker Code

I've had a few inquiries lately about how to track Google AdWords (and other) advertising. It was possible to do this quite easily using multiple landing pages and the usual counter code, but that doesn't fit every use case. Sometimes you want to direct multiple ads (or even all of your advertising) to the same landing page. However, you may still want to distinguish which ad brought which traffic to your site.

In response to this, I posted a Google AdWords code generator. It can be found on your Dashboard page under the Generate HTML menu.

You only need to fill in 2 boxes:

1. The full URL to the landing page on your site which your ad will lead to
2. A name by which you'll be able to identify this ad's traffic in your stats. Usually something like campaign_name/ad_group/ad_name is good enough. It just needs to be something that makes sense to you. Not everyone has the same way of organizing their thoughts, so I'm not going to force any naming conventions on you here.
   

You'll be provided with helpful stats in examining your click traffic and you'll have some ammunition when trying to keep Google honest. After all, we all know that click fraud is out there. It's not a problem that has been solved.

Please note that this wizard can be used with other advertising programs as well. It's only called the AdWords tracker because of the popularity of that particular product. If you use the AdWords code successfully with other ad programs, please let me know which service you were using and how things worked out for you.