Conversion tracking using cookies

[sicmayhem]

Alright well hopefully I don't get flamed to much for this post. I'm not even sure if I'm posting in the right section but here goes.

I want to track my conversion data, but at the same time I want to mask keyword performance from the companies I'm running my campaigns on.

What I've been thinking about is writing a cookie when a user hits my landing page using their IP address and then passing this as the tracking information for conversion tracking. Then when I get a conversion I can just reference that IP address back to my log files and determine their entry keywords. And if its working well I'll just build something that will grep the log files for me and take out the manual process entirely.

But to make a long post short. Is this something that would upset the affiliate site, or possibly get me in trouble with some sort of privacy advocate groups of something.

Just wanted to know other peoples thoughts on this before investing to much time down this road.

 

[micker]

use a good pixel based system, and either host the landing page, or send the traffic from your keyword tracking system to a redirect page to the sponsor landing page so that the refer data gets stripped out.

 

[aeiouy]

This discussions come up fom time to time, and I am as paranoid as the next guy on this stuff.

That being said, do you really think you have some secret keywords that the place that is doing all the business does not know about?

Just not sure it is well-placed effort to hide your keywords be it from a network or an advertiser....

If have some magic keyword that nobody knows about and is giving you 100,000 conversions a day... well maybe you can hide it..

Anyways, there are programs out there that will essentially do what you want and you do not need to use cookies.

You just create your own sub-id and file it in your own database when you pass the traffic.

So when you redirect the traffic you append to the string :

?sub=ax120394

then in your database you store in your entry for ax120394 "smoking hot babies with jammies".

Now all the other person sees is your code. You can refer your code to your database and match them up.

Like I said there are programs out there that already can do this for you, or I know other people who have done it on their own.