using cookies to track advertising results

[ubtheboss]

Hello,

I have a commercial website with a Miva Merchant shopping cart.

I want to start using a PPC search engine but I also want to be able to track and see how many people coming from that engine are resulting in sales.

I know 'about' cookies but have no idea how to use one or how I create one (not a programmer). I think they are the answer but need help with it all.

Also, I cannot alter the code of the shopping cart pages on my site so how do I use cookies to find out if a surfer went through to the end and bought?

It comes down to wanting to track my ROI with this PPC engine.

Also, how do I create a 'tracking url'? I tried the suggestion of using.......... ';?source=whatever........... after the url but when I cut and paste that into the browser address window it doesn't take me to that page on my site.

Thank you anyone who can help!

Phil

[WA]

There's no simple answer to this. What you need is a combination of client and server side features, such as JavaScript cookies combined with sessions. I gather an even more proffesional method is to do all the tracking on the server side (via session, database etc).

I'll move this to the " other server side issues" to see if people have more specific ideas.