There's a misunderstanding about "tracking"
Jason,
Thanks for your in-depth reply. I will start pouring over the changes and see where it takes me.
I want to be clear about something. What I refer to as "tracking" has nothing to do with Google or tracking visitors to the store site!
When I talk about tracking I'm referring to tracking "marketing campaigns". This is about using a marketing concept and associating a coupon code to the marketing concept and "tracking" how successful the marketing concept worked.
Again, as an example. I have a local newspaper in St. Louis called the Riverfront Times that puts out a weekly issue. They have a huge circulation and I could/can purchase from them an "insert" to their weekly circulation. Let's say the insert has some company information, some pictures of the products being offered and a coupon code!
The weekly issue goes out with the insert I paid to piggyback in the issue and people find the insert in the issue. A percentage of those will go to the site and look over the products and a percentage of those will actually choose to purchase something and use the coupon code! That coupon code allows me to build a framework for how well that particular marketing campaign is working. If I don't generate enough sales to offset the cost of the insert then it's not worth using the marketing campaign again. The coupon code then becomes the means of "tracking" the success of the marketing campaign. It has nothing to do with Google and tracking the number of visitors to the site.
In this way, your coupon code could be very effective at helping a store owner. As I mentioned elsewhere, it also would allow a store owner to set up a marketing campaign around helping to fund non-profits with a kick-back from sales if your developers would allow a coupon to be created with a 0% discount. This allows a store owner to sale at full purchase price yet "track" the sale associated through a coupon code to set aside money to kick back to the non-profit they are helping to fund. It's a marketing campaign to help raise funds for an organization. The coupon code allows the store owner to "track" those people purchasing the product because they want a piece of the proceeds to go to the non-profit organization.
You have all the necessary ingredients to allow store owners to do this. It just needs a bit of tweaking to make it possible to use this way and there really should be a better coupon administration capability built into storemanager. I have another post on weaknesses and even flaws in coupon issues, management, etc.
Again, thanks for the pointers. Hope they can help me in working through what I need to do. I'll let you know as I get through out outline of instructions.
~Kim