Determine the Source of Your Clicks
Your own server logs are the best places to determine where your traffic is coming from (i.e., a banner, e-mail or Yahoo! Search Marketing search listing). There are two ways to get the data:
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Review your server logs yourself. These logs are electronic recordings of where your site's clicks are originating. Open the log file in your server software using a text editor such as TextPad. This file has an entry for each click that has come to your site. Just count the entries where "Yahoo! Search Marketing" (or another source) appears in the referring URL. Use third party tracking software. Third party tracking software sorts through your server logs and produces a report of where your traffic originates. But there are drawbacks to using this software because it may count only one IP address per 30 minutes rather than counting all your traffic, resulting in imprecise data.* |
In either case, remember that some advertising methods deliver traffic from more than one Web site. For example, Yahoo! Search Marketing delivers 95% of its traffic from partners like MSN, Yahoo!, and AltaVista. You need to use tracking URLs so you'll know which traffic comes from Yahoo! Search Marketing, even if it looks like it comes from one of our partners.
Using a tracking URL is fairly simple. Just put the following at the end of your URL: "/?source=ysm".
| For example, if your URL is: www.xyz.co.uk
Your tracking URL would be: www.xyz.co.uk/?source=ysm |
It's important to test each new Tracking URL in your own Web browser to verify that it is linking properly to its specified page. If you find that a Tracking URL is not linking properly, you might want to eliminate the forward slash after the domain.
If you decide not to use a tracking URL, it will be nearly impossible to identify all the traffic that comes from Yahoo! Search Marketing to your site. Therefore, tracking URLs are a must for accurate tracking.
* At time of publication.