Track Paid Search Traffic from Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing In Google Analytics
Lets face it, most small and even large businesses simply do not have the funds to use advanced Analytics software such as Omniture or WebTrends. However, with Google Analytics, these companies gain access to a very powerful tool for free. Although this is great, many users quickly find that because it’s so powerful, it’s not as easy to learn and use as one may think.
One of the problems that many e-business owners run into is tracking Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo search marketing visits in Goggle Analytics.
The good news is that you can use Google Analytics to track paid search for Adwords campaigns because Adwords automatically tags keywords. Unfortunately, Yahoo and Mircosoft do not automatically tag paid keywords. While the process is not ‘automatic’ it is fairly simple… at least in theory.
The first step is to go to the Google URL tool builder and make a tag for your keywords. This post at Analytics Talk is a great starting point if you need more information. After you get a feel for tagging URL’s the next step is to insert the following strings so that you do not have to change each URL for every keyword. This helps you avoid manually changing all of your keywords destination URL’s.
- For Yahoo use: utm_term={OVKEY}
- For Adcenter use: utm_term={keyword}
These terms are extremely important as they will tell Google Analytics certain information about the paid keywords. There are more variables that you can place into the string to give you more granular data – Look out for Part 2 of this post for more variables.
The final and the part I have the most fun with is to upload the URL’s into Yahoo! and Adcenter.
First, download the Adcenter desktop software located at here. Once it’s is downloaded, simply highlight all of your keywords and change their destination URL’s with the string that you created in the Google URL toolbuilder. Next, upload the changes, and in about 24 hours visits from Adcenter should begin to appear in your Google Analytics account.
I saved the best for last because if you have made it this far, you can do anything! To get Yahoo data into analytics, you first will have to log into your account and download the campaign into an Excel document. Then you will want to open the document and append the URL that you created to the end of each keywords destination URL. Next upload the Excel document and use the upload feature by filling out a support ticket. – If everything is set up correctly then Yahoo will take care of the rest. The problem is that you need to triple check the upload file to make sure everything is good to go. If not it will be another few days before the data starts to show up in Google Analytics.
If you need help with setting this up feel free to contact us!
