Comments on: Setting up your PPC ads for Optimal Tracking

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By: nethy

nethy — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 04:47:02 +0000

I’d like to congratulate you & the rest of Marketing Motive on this project. Gaining sucess in the field of paid sites/resources will be a great achievment, as I am sure you are all well aware. I just watched your teaser tutorial (I admit from a completely prospecting perspective).
(taking the analogy to the next step) Between that and this post I’ve been convinced to approach the issue of Analytics set-up in a more hands on way and learn to do it properly.

I will also be on the lookout for any parallel pricing back-doors to Marketing Motive membership.

By: nethy

nethy — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 03:57:54 +0000

Thanks
You are preaching to the choir. I prefer to use clicktracks for most analysis but I’d still like to have some of the Google Analytics Reports for things related to adwords.
Do different tools understand each others’ paramaterization formats?

Can you determine your own format & then instruct the analytics tool (clicktracks & Google analytics are the only ones I currently use) to understand it?

I guess it’s asking too much to ask Adwords to cooperate and ad an auto-tag option that would be readable by Clicktracks etc.

The ‘pain’ can be slightly more then mild at times. Because of the way I prefer to set up larger campaigns, (these are the ones where I have the most need for quality tracking and can justify investment in a quality tool and time to use it) I may have 100s of ads running simultaneously so.

By: Michael Stebbins

Michael Stebbins — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:46:44 +0000

The last I checked, (about three months ago) Google won’t give the access to vendors to decrypt the ever-changing gclid. Vendors may want to chime in here… But why be locked into Google analytics? Paramaterization of your ads might be mildly painful at worst (at first), but then you are free to use any tool. ClickTracks is especially useful because it can go back in time and segment on data you collected in the past. Google Analytics is very good for AdWords analysis, but you have to paramaterize all your other ads (Yahoo, etc) to see the data in Google Analytics.

By: nethy

nethy — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 05:16:45 +0000

Is it possible to get other tools (particularly clicktracks) to recognise Adwords/YSM ‘auto tagging’ or ‘auto-parameterization’ or whatever you call it?

By: Michael Stebbins

Michael Stebbins — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 05:08:17 +0000

You are understanding correctly Chad. You are on your way to better measurement of your campaigns.

By: Chad Summerhill

Chad Summerhill — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:29:35 +0000

Micheal,

I appreciate you quick response. Just to make sure I’m understanding you correctly:

I can use the format or a similar format to the one you’ve described above (?src=gglp&camp=1&grp=62&ad=2) and then I could setup most web analytics tools parse out the tracking information.

If I use the auto-parameterization/dynamic query string features offered by the engines it may be easier to tag (but not uniform across engines) and then it would require more work in setting up my analytics tool to parse out the tracking information for each engine.

If I use the auto-parameterization offered through a bid management tool then it provides uniform traking codes across engines, but it makes my life more difficult if/when I change bid management tools(in the case of SearchCenter, I believe it appends a 16 digit code to the destination url and then decodes it SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter.

Is this correct?

thanks,
Chad

By: Michael Stebbins

Michael Stebbins — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:27:01 +0000

Chad,

A significant part of your choice of parameter technique will relate to the exclusivity of the system required by your vendor. For example, Google Analytics and other web analytics tools have pre-determined parameter names, that when set, are automatically picked up and assessed.

Then you have the “autoparam” systems that rewrite your ad URLs in AdWords and other systems. I took a look at SearchCenter and could not find the claim of what I’d call “auto-parameterization” of PPC URLs. Doesn’t mean it’s not there. I’ve put in a request to my contacts at Omniture for clarification.

It’s a little extra work, but I choose to parameterize my own ads to ensure that the scheme is usable for multiple web analytics programs, and doesn’t lock me into one system.

Michael

By: Chad Summerhill

Chad Summerhill — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:45:28 +0000

I will be implementing Omniture’s SearchCenter product in the near future, and according to Omniture SearchCenter automatically ads the appropriate tracking url to all ads. They claim that for each click I will be able to see:

engine/campaign/ad group/landing page/ad name/keyword/

So, that would mean that I don’t have to individually tag anything. SearchCenter identifies the account structure and applies the appropriate tracking.

Is it really this easy, or am I missing something.