Google Analytics Doesn’t Always Set the Cookie
April 6th 2009 04:10 pm
In writing my own keyword tracking script that
The Google cookie is not always being created. Which means I get no data for that visitor.
I found lots and lots of records in my table that had blank fields. At first I thought these were robots. But then I noticed that some of them turned into sales. Never heard of a robot buying anything before.
A few days ago I was modifying my script to be used with a new campaign. As I tested, I discovered that one time when I clicked to my site, the google cookie was not set and I ended up writing one of these ghost records to my tracking table.
Before I wasted time with too much troubleshooting, I tried it again. This time the cookie was set.
So I don’t know exactly what the problem is, but I DO know that I can’t count on Google to always set that cookie. So I started looking at other alternatives.
I found a free open source keyword tracker called Prosper202.
Their original product is called Tracking202, which is the same as Prosper202 but it hosted by them. You log into a web account to manage your tracking. But I wanted something that I host myself, so I downloaded and installed Prosper202.
I will review it in another post. Stay tuned.
- reads the Google Analytics cookie
- writes the fields of the cookie to a mysql table with an auto-increment primary key
- appends that primary key number onto the end of my affiliate link as the subid number
The Google cookie is not always being created. Which means I get no data for that visitor.
I found lots and lots of records in my table that had blank fields. At first I thought these were robots. But then I noticed that some of them turned into sales. Never heard of a robot buying anything before.
A few days ago I was modifying my script to be used with a new campaign. As I tested, I discovered that one time when I clicked to my site, the google cookie was not set and I ended up writing one of these ghost records to my tracking table.
Before I wasted time with too much troubleshooting, I tried it again. This time the cookie was set.
So I don’t know exactly what the problem is, but I DO know that I can’t count on Google to always set that cookie. So I started looking at other alternatives.
I found a free open source keyword tracker called Prosper202.
Their original product is called Tracking202, which is the same as Prosper202 but it hosted by them. You log into a web account to manage your tracking. But I wanted something that I host myself, so I downloaded and installed Prosper202.
I will review it in another post. Stay tuned.
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Prosper202 Review | Internet Marketing Kultch responded on 06 Apr 2009 at 5:42 pm #
[...] level for affiliate products. It worked pretty well, but I found one flaw due to the fact that Google doesn’t always seem to set the cookie. So instead I decided to find software that was already out there to do tracking. I found [...]