My customer asked me today, “That information is great and extremely valuable. What would make it even better is if when the visitor arrived at the inquiry form, there was a way to extract the campaign information from the analytics cookie and put that into a hidden field on the form…so when the form is submitted, the sales person that receives it not only sees the information the visitor filled out, but they also have a field that shows which campaign(s) let that person to ultimately fill out the inquiry form.” That was not verbatim, but hopefully you understand what they are asking for.

I know that the cookies must track all of the campaigns because Google Analytics shows that information in the reports. It’s automatically pulling out that information when someone lands on the inquiry form page and putting it into a hidden field (they don’t want the customer seeing that information) so the sales department can see it that will really complete the report system.

If anyone knows how to do this or has any insights that would be awesome. Thanks.

@Jorge it sounds like a tricky scenario but here is what I would suggest… once your sales guy has filled out the form, give the visitor a reason to revisit your website. For example, a free report or confirmation of details page. Email this to them and encourage them to click through in order to complete. Make that page a goal conversion page in GA (you could have it as a separate “offline conversions” goal).

Trying to spoof cookies would be a bit unreliable and could cause problems if the visitor comes back to your site. I have never tried so I can’t say that it will or won’t work, but it seems a bit “hacky” to me and I would try and avoid that route.

Hope that helps!

Since you seem to know your way around GA and the way they use cookies I have a pickle for you…

Let’s say a person goes to google.com, searches for certain keywords and then clicks on an AdWords ad that gets them to my website. When they get to my website they get served all the GA cookies as usual. it so happens that 40% of our “conversions” (which is a form being submitted) happen over the phone; that is, the visitor calls our office and then one of our reps fills the form for them.

We also have a “Session ID” generated on our website that is unique for each visitor. So when a person clicks on an AdWords ad, they get to our site, get their GA cookies and we also generate the Session ID which we store locally. We then ask for the Session ID over the phone (we have it on a corner of our website) and they read it back to us.

My question is: Since I can match a unique Session ID with a unique set of GA Cookies, would I be able to “recreate” those cookies in my local machine, fill out the form and when I submit it “trick” GA to think that the one who filled out the form was actually the original website visitor? All this is aimed at being able to record conversions down to the keyword level for all online AND offline conversions.

Thank you!

Thank you
Polly

Thank you!
Mike