Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter all allow you, the advertiser, to set up unique URLs to point back to your website. In fact, each ad may (and should) have it's own unique URL. You don't need to create unique landing pages for each ad. But instead, you can make each URL unique through the use of URL parameters. By adding parameters to each URL, you will be able to track performance of each campaign in a variety of web analytics tools. It looks like this:

Display URL = www.site.com/special_offer Actual URL = http://www.site.com/sp.php?src=gglp&camp=1&grp=62&ad=2 The Display URL is what will show up… Continue reading

Web stats are fun. Entertaining.  Colorful.  But decision making seems to be reserved for the 15% of web analytics users who are intent on growing a business.  If your website affects your revenue, you owe it to yourself to skip the senseless stats, like hit counts and unfiltered visitor counts, and enter every web analytics session with a question in mind. Questions like: Which ads will I delete today? Which referrers will I reward? My posts in this blog will help move you into the 15% that use web analytics to fulfill a strategic direction. --Michael…