Integrating Google Adwords With Convio Donations

Hi Jason,

Unfortunately, you have to link to a page on your organizations site first. Knowing that I can make two suggestions.

(1)

You can ask your account manager to set up a server side redirection from a specific page on your site to the form. Not sure if Convio does this? You could even try a basic META Refresh to your form, but that may poo-pooed for various reasons. See http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol4/promo_no15.htm. You may want to try linking your AdWord link to a URL Shortcut (myconviosite.com/shortcut) and have that shortcut point to your form.

We've since run tests on using URL shortcuts with Google and it does not work. When we loaded the new AdWords using a shortcut URL the ads came back disapproved. We took the initiative to investigate this and discovered Google's policy prohibits the use of redirects in sponsored links. Your destination URL has to match the actual web page your are directing people too. Additionally, your display URL (the URL searchers see) has to match your destination URL, which you probably already know. If the final landing page does not match the display or destination URL set in your AdWord account your ads will not be approved.

(2)

Set up a landing page on your site with a link to the form. You'll need to modify the GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Code).

This is a method described and adapted to Convio in a book by Brian Clifton called Advanced Web Metrics.

If your landing page initiates a donation process on a separate secure site like https//secure3.convio.net you need to make additional changes to your web pages. This is because Google Analytics uses first party cookies. This means only the domain which sets the cookies can read or modify them-a security feature built into web browsers by default. You can pass your first party cookies to your third party domain with the following method.

First, ensure that you have installed the GATC on both your primary site pages and all donation form pages. I do this by injecting the GATC into my PageWrappers via a reus element. Two pages require further modification, and you may want to use some Convio conditionals to control this: the landing page of your site that links to the form and the entry page visitors use to donate (the form).

For both pages modify the GATC as follows:

<opening-SCRIPT-tag type=text/javascript>

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");

document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

<closing-SCRIPT-tag>

<opening-SCRIPT-tag type=text/javascript>

try {

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");

pageTracker._setDomainName("none"); //mod 1

pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true); //mod 2

pageTracker._initData(); //mod 3

pageTracker._trackPageview();

} catch(err) {}

<closing-SCRIPT-tag>

You then need to modify the web page (PageBuilder) link that links to the secure site:

<opening-a-tag href=https://secure.convio.net/org/site/Donation2?store=parameters" onclick="javascript&colon;pageTracker._link(this.href); return false;">Now that you have made the decision to support us please donate today<closing-a-tag>

With this method, the Google Analytics cookies are passed to the receiving domain by appending them to the URL string. If you see __utm, __utmb and __utmc parameters in your forms' address then this has worked.

On the brightside this is much more scalable to larger campaigns that may have more than one goal. And you can generate some cool reports from GA - like funnel reports!

-Kevin