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Track Attack

Applejack's MD Peter Stubbs believes that Google's conversion tracking tools don't work, and that their communication to the user regarding tracking is flawed. Here he outlines why...

This is for anyone who has used Google’s conversion tracking tools because as far as I am concerned they do not work and technically there is no way they can work.

The way that Google says it works is:

"If the user clicks on your ad and reaches one of your conversion pages, the user’s browser sends the cookie to a Google server, and a small conversion tracking image is displayed on your site. When such a match is made, Google records a successful conversion for you."

This is why it can never work:

In the JavaScript code conversion there is no call made to the cookie and it is not sent back. What is sent back is an http image call to Google’s server that passes the "google_conversion_id", the "google_conversion_value", the "google_conversion_label", and the date and time. Therefore as no read of any cookie is made on the conversion page every hit from that page - whether or not it originated from clicking on Google's Adword or elsewhere - will return the image call to Google's server and therefore it is impossible to track.

What I don't understand is why they do this when to do it properly (and actually read the cookie) is so simple to do!

What they should actually do (and which again should be very simple) is every time an Adword is served up this writes a unique cookie based upon the number of times that Adword has been called. If this is based upon the keyword it would be simple to identify every unique visitor who subsequently makes a sale. Also, the stats won’t be screwed up if the users come from shared machines.

However what is really disturbing is that if this doesn't work it throws doubt on the other systems they say they have in place in particular for tracking click fraud.

I also asked them why I have to show their advert on my site after a user makes a sale. Their response was that it is because they want the user to know that they are being tracked. Okay, so they want the user to know they are being tracked after they have been tracked. Which is a bit like bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Why the hell should my brand equity be potentially diminished by Google because of people being annoyed that they have been informed after the fact, when it is Google who are the ones supposedly doing the tracking? If they were really that concerned about letting the user know, they should have a pop box on their site every time a user clicks on an Adword informing them that they are about to be tracked and giving them the option not to be.

You can easily get round this by putting the code on your own page and changing the image attributes for height and width to 0 or putting it in a hidden DIV layer.

About the author: Peter Stubbs is the MD of Applejack.co.uk, a full service online solutions company specialising in bespoke Content Management Systems, E-Commerce, Search Engine Marketing and Optimisation as well as professional hosting.  Peter is interested in getting an opinion on whether or not this contravenes the Trades Description Act. Leave your message for him below.