Good way to track sales leads on website (referrer traffic)

Question

I have kind of a dilemma. I need to start tracking sales leads because I have 2 sales guys and I don't want to be giving up organic SEO leads to them, but at the same time I don't want to cheat them out of work.

What's happening alot lately is people are clicking on our quote form and I get it not knowing its from one of the sales guys and they end up getting upset when they find out joe blow already received a quote from me when they have been talking to the guy for 3 months.

So here's what I was thinking, and if theres a better way or any ideas you guys have, I'd love to hear them...

Most of the traffic from them comes from email and ALL traffic would come from a link that they provided to the client. So i'm wondering if just doing something like www.oursite.com/salesman and having that controller just set a session variable like $salesman = 'salesguy'; That followed them around the site. Then they could browse around anywhere they wanted and when they filled out the quote form, send along that session variable. If the variable is "empty" then I know if was from organic traffic and if it had a name obviously it would belong to a sales guy.

My only problem with this approach is sending a link that has random uri's. I don't really want to send a link like oursite/anything

How compatible would it be with various email clients to do an html link where the anchor text was just www.oursite.com but the link was www.oursite.com/salesman

All your ideas, suggestions and criticisms are appreciated.

Answer 1

I don't see any issues with having a different text/ vs link, that's done all the time.

I think it was rackspace that use to do a similar thing. They'd have something like rackspace.com?repid=3324324

Should work fine.