My name is Chuck C.. I have been a web developer for 10 years. I've learned everything on my own and have never taken a computer course. All the answers are online if you know what questions to ask! HOWEVER, there was one issue that I never found an nswer to and that was how to track conversions with PayPal sales.
We even hired a company to manage our Adwords campaigns and they didn't have a 100% solution!
Here's an easy to implement solution that I use that is 100% foolproof, doesn't require a pHD in programming and is easy to implement.
Everyone interested has seen people talk about using Google Analytics to track Adwords conversions. Problem is that you can't get Paypal to run javascript (even using the IPN). Adding it to your Thank you page will work, but many people don't return to your site after they make a purchase. Auto-redirect only applies to sales using a PayPal account and it you have a reirect statement in your Add to Cart buttons, tht statement overides the Auto-redirect in PayPal Profile setup.
Here's the solution.
PayPal
has a little known feature called "Child Accounts". You can have an unlimited number of child accounts which PayPal sets up for you for free.
On a daily basis, the monies in the child accounts is automatically transferred to the Parent Account and identified as a child account transfer.
Each child account can have its own primary email address. We created a duplicate website with a dot.co ending which was identical as our dot.com main site. (we have 12 different ecommerce domains). We created a unique email address for the dot.co site ([email-address[@[yoursite.co].
In Adowrds the links were to that dot.co site. The only way a person can find that site is through Adwords. No Index / No follow was added to the pages so search engines won't index it or follow it.
If a sale is made at the dot.co via Adwords, it is reported to us via the dot.co email assigned to the Child account.
Thats it! We know our conversion ratio and can manage our adwords account with knowledge of conversions.
