How do I track sales through OneBox vs. froogle.google.com?
While this seems initially like it’ll be a simple task, OneBox ends up being very difficult to really track down the sales from. The same feed, which many times has a parameter of ref=base or xsrc=base, ends up feeding Google Base, Froogle, and OneBox results.
What this means is you can’t totally trust your analytics. They’ll easily find those that arrived at a page with that parameter and track the sales, but they don’t typically break things down the way you’re going to want to here.
The easy answer is to not worry about it. After all, it’s all the same feed and isn’t really that different, regardless of the true source. But, being a data junky, I couldn’t possibly live with that answer. That’s just not the best way to go about optimizing in my opinion. I want to know what’s actually working and what isn’t.
The primary sources that you’re going to look for are base.google.com, froogle.google.com, and www.google.com. By breaking things down by source after finding those visitors with the parameter added, you’re going to find the actual visitors from each source. Using a very simple logfile analysis tool won’t cut it here, so if you’re using the free stuff I think you’ll be out of luck. Most Enterprise level analytics packages will handle this fine, though.
Basically, base.google.com means a Base user, froogle.google.com means a froogle user, and www.google.com means a OnBox referral. So there you have it - it’s really not that tough, but it’s also not that easy to pull out of your analytics.
Comment by Thomas | April 13th, 2007
It should be possible to add tracking code (UTM Tag) to the end of each product URL in your base product file, and have Google Analytics track each link that has that code in it.
Comment by Brian Mark | April 15th, 2007
Thomas,
That’ll track everything through Google Base, but if you want to track ONLY OneBox results and not everything (base, froogle, and onebox) together, it’s much more difficult.