tracking adwords conversions through paypal IPN?

[Feenz]

Hi All

I'm having some trouble.

I'm using paypal to take payment for my first attempt at a muse.

My adwrods are very inefficient, and I'm working hard to try to optimise them.

But I can't find a way to track conversions once people leave for paypal, unless they click the "return to merchant's website" button after paying.

How do you guys deal with this please?

[rsmudge]

This is a tough one. I was playing with IPN awhile ago and it was just making my head hurt. I'm a programmer by trade so the answers I have are technical.

1. Consider keeping track of who gets to your pre-paypal page and making a file on the server with their IP address and other information.

2. When someone comes in, have a folder called referrers and dump their referrer into a file named after their IP. You can then cross reference the rough timestamp of a paypal sale with (1) and this info in (2).

Naturally you could do these steps using memcached or mysql--just have a way to save and retrieve values by a key.

...

Optionally... you could do (2) and attach a piece of Javascript to the PayPal button. Assume if someone clicks to leave for PayPal then you likely have a sale (would be interesting to see numbers on whether this is true or not). When they click the JS button an asynchronous call is made to your server saying this IP is going for a sale, you can cross reference this with (2) automatically and get a better idea of which referrers are turning into conversions how often. Of course the JS should make sure the button continues to behave as expected despite the extra call.

...

Or finally... if you feel like mucking with it (I played with IPN for a day)--you could track the referrer information however its appropriate to do so for your web framework--and pass this as a variable for PayPal to pass back via IPN. I think this is possible but didn't get this far in my toying with it.

...

Good luck!

[Feenz]

hi rsmudge

Thanks for your reply.

Sorry I wasn't clear.

I'm already using Paypal's IPN system.

The problem is this :

When a payment is made, paypal initiates a call to an IPN script on your server. You can then run all sorts of code on here, most notably your code to do whatever it is you need to do when you've made a sale.

The user is then given the option to return to your site. If they click this, they return to a success page.

If you put the google adwords tracking code on this page, all works great, and the tracking all tallies up correctly in adwords.

However, if people don't bother clicking to return to your site (Which they don't seem to very often), this code will never run.

So..

The next option is to put this code on the IPN script. The problem with this, is that this script is triggered by paypal's session, not by the user session, and as such, google has no idea how to tie the two together.

-

The only way I know of to solve this is to upgrade the paypal service to Pro, or whatever it is, so that users never leave our site.

But this will require SSL, etc.

Might be that I have to bite that bullet.

[David_D]

Hi All


But I can't find a way to track conversions once people leave for paypal, unless they click the "return to merchant's website" button after paying.



i've seen a few sites that have a

"please click 'Return to site' to receive item"

On quite a few sites

:-)

[Gongchime]

"please click 'Return to site' to receive item"

Slick as snot that. Such an elegant, non-technical solution. If you can't beat em, trick em.

Hey, your shoelace is untied...then WHAM!

[David_D]

"please click 'Return to site' to receive item"

Slick as snot that. Such an elegant, non-technical solution. If you can't beat em, trick em.

Hey, your shoelace is untied...then WHAM!


Thanks Greg i try my best :-)

[Feenz]

Yeah, this was the only thing I could think to do, having remembered seeing that on another site.

I just wonder if would end up hurting conversions.

[Mike Rhodes]

can't see how any of this can hurt conversions - they've already bought!
the problem is tracking & being able to optimise adwords the right way.
I've yet to see a better suggestion than david's


a variation on the theme...

Like surprises? In addition to your product I also have an additional free bonus. Just click here (big red button) to go back to my site & get it right now.
No tricks, no catch.

not as simple - but might be worth testing...

another non-programming thought...
is there any way in paypal (I haven't used it in a long time) that you can put a different image on the receipt page???
I know you can add a banner at the top - but can you put something (anything!) just on the receipt page?
that way you could track views of that image through analytics & use that as a rough guide to conversions
bit clunky though & doesn't really give you the adwords data without further work-arounds