ROI Tracking for Web Marketing Campaigns

A good customer of mine asked how to market his services on ESPN.com w/o this web propoerty offering conversion metrics.

I did some brainstorming and here are some solutions:

1. Look into web analalytic packages that you can integrate into your website. This can be expensive, confusing and time consuming. At the end of the day, you want to simply know how many clicks you received, at what cost, and how much did it cost to drive each sale.

2. Place ads on ESPN with a unique URL, then every month, look at how much you spent with ESPN, and then look at your web logs. For this to work, your ISP's web logs need to be able to tell you the referring URL's for the sales you generated. Then, though a little more manually intensive, you can calculate your cost per sale on sites like ESPN by matching the number of sales from your site with the specific unique URL's. TIP: to start, just ad a "partner code" unique identifier, like ESPN, to every ad you put on ESPN.com.

If you have other solutions not mentioned above, please share them!!

BACKGROUND: My company calculates avg. cost per sale for our clients for free with their campaigns on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN by using the "scripts" placed on all the checkout screens. Just recently, due to pressure from big advertisers, sites like ESPN, and a few other major web properties, stopped using Google's adsense product because advertisers did not know where their ads were showing up -- maybe next to a few innaproprieste sites! As a result, ESPN now uses a different ad display company. Now, any biz can target their ads to appear on ESPN, and still pay on a pay-per-click basis; however, ESPN does not offer the free conversion tracking capabilities like Yahoo and Google offer.