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I'm with Alick300, using an event on the onclick event on the link is the way to go. If you run jQuery on your pages, it should be pretty easy to select all the links going to tripadvisor.com and attach the goal tracking event code after the page has loaded. It'll be 1 line of jQuery code... you shouldn't need to go through and add this to thousands of links by hand.
I think all the implementations work just about the same. We chose to do it in our sitemaps because that was the easiest for our developer to implement. You should choose one or the other, there's no need to do multiple implementations.
You should be able to can control the rate at which the bot accesses you pages by adding a crawl delay in your robots.txt file. Robots.txt and crawl delay is discussed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard, and Slurp bot here: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN22600.html.
Should look like this in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 30
The crawl delay is the number of seconds the bot should wait between pageview (ask your IT guys what's appropriate for you). I stuck 30 in there, meaning the Slurp bot would only be able to access up to 2 pages a minute.
If you're trying to include this script in the Optimizely editor, it wouldn't work because the code in the editor is already Javascript, so it's like you're trying to next a
I think the script for Universal Analytics (new new version of GA) is built with subdomain tracking built in. According to this Google article about cross domain tracking, "This document is only for tracking users across domains where browser restrictions prevent cookies from being shared. Tracking users across subdomains does not require any additional configuration."
I'd try the regular script, and see if you can see traffic on both URLs for all of your subdomains. If you can, then it's working!
Make sure you're set up to track multiple subdomains within your GA set up. Then it should be the same script on your Marketo landing pages as well as your website.
The set up will be different if the landing pages aren't on your domain, but Marketo does support that. If you're not doing that, you should!
(This is all speculation as I've never done this before. There are probably people in the forum that have)
Be aware you're switching from a ccTLD to a gTLD. Is the clinic primarily for Canadian residents? In the simplest terms, switching from a .ca to a .clinic may hurt your Canadian rankings, and help your rankings everywhere else. If you want your site to continue targeting Canadians specifically, you can set that in your Google Webmaster Tools, although I think having the .ca domain itself is a stronger indicator to Google that your site is geared towards Canadians.
Aren't the Marketo landing pages living on a subdomain of your site (and not on marketo.com)? If that's the case, and you install the GA script on those pages just like any other pages, and have the GA profile set up to look at traffic from all subdomains (not just specifically one subdomain), things should work fine.
We use both Adwords and Adroll. My preference is always to do everything myself, and Adwords gives me complete control. With Adroll, you'll have reps who are generally very responsive and good, but you still need them to help manage and optimize your campaigns. So I'd second what Ray-pp is saying. Use Adroll when you're ready to expand your reach outside of the Google Display Network, once you're already running (very) profitable retargeting campaigns in Adwords.
In your comment below, it sounds like you're comparing your search clicks with display clicks. Search clicks are always more expensive since there's implied intent in the fact the user is searching for something. With $700 CPCs, retargeting is probably really important for you to try and recapture that user once you got them to your site. You could try some retargeting through YouTube as well if display ads are working.
If you have Adwords reps, I'd strongly recommend trying to get into the SCM beta, which is what the industry generally calls "search retargeting". This would allow you to target users searching for those expensive queries (on Google, Bing, & Yahoo) after that fact via display ads. It's in beta, but I think it's a fairly open beta at this point so if you have reps, you can probably get into it. I couldn't find a good Google article about it, but this sums it up nicely.
Keri has it right, you can include or exclude users based on pages they've visited or actions they've taken on your site. So you can target people who visited a certain page (or did something like added an item to their cart), and then exclude those who have checked out.
There's a bunch of remarketing features within Adwords, like Dynamic remarketing for retailers, remarketing lists for search ads, & Google Analytics remarketing. Beyond Adwords, there's Facebook, Twitter, and partners to get remarketing ads on placements outside of the Google Display Network, like Adroll and Doubleclick.
Have you tried any of Google's bidding algorithms, like Conversion Optimizer, ROAS bidding, or enhanced CPC? Google will take device (or at least browser) into account when adjusting bids with these, so you should see your tablet spend drop off if you're using one of these algorithms.
This is sort of a random aside, but I read about someone trying to only use Adwords geared towards a certain browser by reading the user agent of the browser after someone clicked an ad, and only including a conversion script on landing page when the user was using the right browser. Then you could set Conversion Optimizer to using a CPA equivalent to the CPC you're looking for, and Google will stop showing ads to those other browsers since they're not converting. Pretty clever, but I've never done anything like that myself.
Sure! I'd still recommend getting things set up yourself within Adwords as a first step. Use lots of different segments to reach the right set of potential customers. You can do segmenting within Google Analytics now for Adwords retargeting (read more here). Retargeting has even made its way into search ads (see here)!
We ended up partnering with Adroll and Doubleclick, and we continue to work with both. It's nice to have at least 1 retargeting partner outside of Adwords to get extra reach outside of the Google Display Network. With Adroll you can also try out retargeting on Facebook and Twitter (although you can run those in-house these days as well). My impressions are that Doubleclick is a little less sophisticated, but has added some nice scale as well for us.
Adwords will attribute the conversion to the last click, provided it happened within the last 30 days.
Some examples may help clarify this:
You can see the different conversion paths within Google Analytics. My favorite report is the Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversions Paths report. I usually view it with a primary dimension of Source/Medium Path, and add a secondary dimension of Campaign Path (make sure at the top Path Length is set to "All", and you have the appropriate types of conversions selected). This will show the conversion paths for all of your conversions.
Hope this helps!
You should try A/B testing this change, so you know which is better! The best A/B testing provider out there is Optimizely. I can't speak more highly of their software and support. If you don't want to pay, Google Analytics has a built in testing tool called Experiments. Back when it was Google Website Optimizer, it was a far cry from Optimizely in terms of setting up and deploying experiments.
You have this right, more or less. For display remarketing, they only require 100 people to be cookied to start serving ads, according to this. People will cycle in and out of the list based on when they were cookied, like you outlined in your question. So the list will increase for 60 days, and then likely will steady out if your traffic is relatively steady as new visitors arrive and non-recent visitors are removed from the list.
If you get Adwords remarketing up and running and it's working well, try it out on more pages or flows on your site. If you want to try it out based on events on your site, you try Google Analytics Remarketing without adding more code to your site (note that this type of remarketing is not supported for search remarketing). When it's time to branch out, there are a few more larger platforms you can try out remarketing on:
You can track conversions through both platforms, and still upload conversions from Google Analytics (GA) to Adwords if you want to. It makes sense to track conversions through both, because I'm sure you have conversions coming from other marketing campaigns and from organic sources that you can't track through Adwords. Adwords conversion tracking will only track conversions where the user clicked through from an Adwords ad, so you won't get a complete picture.
Unless you view conversions in GA showing all touches, you'll see some differences in conversion tracking between the two platforms, due to differences in attribution. For example, if someone clicks on an Adwords ad, and then later that day clicks an organic listing to your site and converts, then in Adwords that'll count as a conversion for Adwords, and in GA that'll count as a conversion for the organic listing.
If those pages are essentially duplicate content, then you should use a canonical. If you Google to index each of those pages separately, and return each one in search results, then you should not use one. Do you want people who search for text that matches your context and character tabs closely to be linked directly into those tabs, or should they always start at the overview page? If they should always start at the overview, you can try the canonical tags. Be aware that if the page contents aren't very similar, Google may ignore these.
Anywhere in the is fine, it doesn't matter where you place it.
This is completely benign. It gives you the option to add a few more columns in the Adwords interface, like:
I haven't really looked at the conversion statistics that get brought in, but I don't think Adwords will act on any of them (for example if you use conversion optimizer). It's solely to provide you with data that's in Google Analytics within the Adwords interface.
It sounds like Martijn solved your problem, but I still wanted to add that robots.txt exclusions keep search bots from reading pages that are disallowed, but it does not stop those pages from being returned in search results. When those pages do appear, a lot of times they'll have a page description along the lines of "A description of this page is not available due to this sites robots.txt".
If you want to ensure that pages are kept out of search engines results, you have to use the noindex meta tag on each page.
If you stick the following meta tag in the of a page, Google and Bing won't show cached versions that page on search results pages:
It shouldn't have any impact on SEO. It only means that archived versions of pages won't appear be provided by the search engines on search result pages.
As far as reasons to do this, we use it on pages of our site where the cached page would be blank, because the page contents are loaded by AJAX, and the cached versions wouldn't load that content.