Identifying the source from which you acquire a new customer -- hey, everybody wants to do that! The question of how to go about it exactly, and how precisely it can be done, well, that's not as clear cut. But here's one way within Total Blue System that you can both observe and or ask customers directly from whence they've come:
- Create a Source,
starting within the Contacts module in Total Blue's Admin Area. See the nearby screen shot showing the Name and Code that can be configured. The Name is what you'll call it, and what can appear to shoppers on the public website.
- The Code is relevant when your website integrates with your internal database or order fulfillment system and you want to pass in a tracking code along with the order. Note that if a shopper enters a Coupon Code during the cart check-out process, and there's no other overriding code matched according to the Sources explained here, than the coupon code will be inserted into this Code field when the order is downloaded to your order fulfillment system.
- Sources can be configured to appear on a "How did you hear about us?"
question when a shopper is completing the form to create a new website account. In such a case, you're asking the customer to tell you directly by choosing from a set of possible answers. This is helpful should you advertise or be featured in a print publication, for example. It serves in cases when the only way of knowing the source is to ask people to identify their referring source.
Sometimes people choose not to identify their source. Sometimes they don't create a new website account, but choose the Express checkout option. In such circumstances, you still want to know where the order came from. In this case, better to observe directly the referring source web site. That's where the Domain Pattern configuration is useful.
- A regular expression can be created to recognize the referring URL for a website shopper. When that domain name is marked as a source, then orders placed by visitors who were referred from those domains can have special details included in the order to identify their source. These details are imported into your internal database or internal order management system with each order.
In the example shown in the nearby screen shot, both asking and observing are in
progress. The "how did you hear about us?" form is asking the shopper, and the domain pattern is watching and matching shoppers with pre-established "sources" that match the shoppers' referring URL's. Either way, you'll identify the source.
Note: there are abilities to track the source of orders within Google Analytics that are independent of this method described here. But they can complement one another. Google Analytics is concerned with the marketer's dilemma of what can be observed about a website visitor's activities. Goals can be established and tracking codes embedded in URL's to identify sources like Froogle.
That method is useful for slicing and dicing the data within Google Analytics, but it's not going to tie back into your order management system. Therefore the Source configuration described above ought also be given attention. If we keep the example of Froogle, the link above describes embedded tracking codes in the URL's. But what also ought be done is to configure a Source in the Admin Area for Froogle.
In the screen shot nearby, 
see how the Source will observe orders referred by the Froogle (or GoogleBase) shopping engine. The Domain Pattern match will identify it. However, shoppers won't be asked whether they came from Froogle when creating a new account. You're observing, not asking.
If using the Catalog module's product feed to GoogleBase, you'll want to configure a Source in the Contacts module to track sources accordingly.
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