Beyond WT.srch — The Better Way To Track PPC
If you set up your pay-per-click program so landing pages contain the parameter WT.srch=1, WebTrends Analytics has some out-of-the-box reports that will use WT.srch to generate info on paid search engines and terms. WebTrends also uses WT.srch as a flag for adding information to the Visitor History table for things like the initial paid search engine, ever, for that visitor.
You can also use WT.srch=1 yourself to create filters for pay-per-click traffic, for example to look at geography or to look at natural search by filtering PPC out.
If you want to go all-out, you can bump up your WebTrends arrangement to include the services of Dynamic Search, a separate WebTrends offering that does a sophisticated job of tracking and, especially, automatically managing bids and placements. For extensive programs, the payoffs for automated bid management tend to be spectacular compared to even skilled human management.
However, if you don’t have Dynamic Search you will still want much more PPC reporting than what WT.srch gives you.
Why? The problem with the canned WebTrends Analytics paid search reports is that they are designed to report only on search-related information that’s in the referrer field of the landing page. In these days of broad matching, that’s pretty much useless to your PPC management efforts.
- The referrer field contains only the actual search terms used and the actual engine where the ad appeared. The referrer field does not reveal the terms you paid for, much less the match type, so there’s no way to connect a visit to your program’s operating details – the terms and match type you paid for, the keyword subgroup, how much you paid, and so on. And, possibly worst of all, you can’t even match the actual search engine (AOL, myway, etc) to its formal affiliated PPC network – Google, Yahoo, or MSN.
- Furthermore, you may not realize that a substantial number of PPC visits have no recorded referrer at all ! In a large site’s records that we examined recently, Google’s PPC visits had 19% “no referrer” visits; Yahoo topped 12%, and MSN had around 5%. (Go here for possible reasons for direct traffic visits)
All of this points to one solution that involves some work on your part >>> get extra tracking parameters into the destination (landing) page URL.
If you put tracking parameters in the destination landing page, those parameters will be there even if the referrer field is empty. And they will allow you to track the business value of visits in ways that influence the management of your PPC spending.
The tracking parameters you get into the destination URL should consist of some or all of the following:
- The mother program for the PPC ad (Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, Microsoft search advertising, etc.
- The actual term paid for
- The match type, which varies from program to program. Its values might be “broad,” “exact,” “phrase,” “advanced,” “standard,” or possibly “content match.”
- The site on which the ad was displayed when the user clicked on it
- A campaign or group ID that corresponds to how you have the term grouped in the PPC admin program.
- A subcampaign or subgroup ID that corresponds to the optional subgroup in the PPC admin program
- Whether the PPC ad is text or image
- The ad copy variation (the “creative”) that the visitor clicked on (Google’s ad optimization program, for example, rotates ad copy for you. Knowing the text that the visitor actually saw is essential for doing your own evaluation of alternatives)
- On Google AdWords, the Network used (Google itself, versus the Google Search Network which includes AOL and many others)
- And finally, as a sort of obvious overkill, the fact that the visit comes from paid search (the aforementioned WT.srch, value of 1)
If you don’t track and report on the quality of visits for at least some of the above additional PPC factors, in my humble opinion you shouldn’t be bothering to use WT.srch=1 at all.
The custom reports and filters related to these parameters are not hard to set up.
Getting these parameters to happen in the first place is harder. It’s a different process for Google and Bing.
And here’s a design for a custom report that shows which actual search terms were matched (by the PPC program) to the terms you actually paid for.
Finally, we have to note with regret that this way of tracking sponsored search information, while much superior to what WebTrends does out of the box, is NOT recorded in the Visitor History table. In other words, the Visitor History reports such as Most Recent Paid Search Term will still show the crummy information from the referrer field. There are workaround for this involving the versatile and valuable WT.seg parameters, and we’ll go into that in another post.
11 comments
Hi Rocky
any progress on how to for Google and MSN?
“The easiest one by far is Yahoo Sponsored Search, and we’ve posted a how-to here.”
Thx
John
Hi John,
MSN, for starters. It’s not as easy as Yahoo, but it’s not hard. MSN will insert the right information if you put the following strings into URL parameters when you create your destination URLs.
Here’s the full list of dynamic keywords available in adCenter:
{Keyword}
{MatchType}
{QueryString}
{OrderItemID}
{AdID}
So, you can create this destination URL:
http://yoursite.com/yourpage.jsp?product=1235&color=blue
And you can append to it:
&KW={Keyword}&matchtype={MatchType}&querywas={QueryString}&adID={AdID}
If your destination URL has no parameters in the original, such as:
http://yoursite.com/yourpage.jsp
Then your appended string has to start with a question mark, not an ampersand:
?PPCProgram=MSN&KW={Keyword}&matchtype={MatchType}&querywas={QueryString}&adID={AdID}
Either way, your destination URL ends up with one question mark and as many ampersands as needed, such as:
http://yoursite.com/yourpage.jsp?product=1235&color=blue&PPCProgram=MSN&KW={Keyword}&matchtype={MatchType}&querywas={QueryString}&adID={AdID}
http://yoursite.com/yourpage.jsp?PPCProgram=MSN&KW={Keyword}&matchtype={MatchType}&querywas={QueryString}&adID={AdID}
You can use Excel or Microsoft Ad Center’s ad manager or even Word to do the appending. In Excel it’s called “concatenate.”
In the above, note that the parameter names (KW,matchtype,querywa,adID) can be anything you want, such as keyword,match,originalquery,ad.
Hi Rocky,
So how about Google? Come on, spill it!
Thanks,
Chris
So …. busy …. will do that soon. Sorry!
Bang on Rocky!!
thanks and whenever you get a chance for Google we really appreciate that!
John
John send me your mailing address & size privately and when I get Outsider t-shirts together I will send you one! For your perseverance, patience, and politeness.
Google disappoints us because it does not give us match type information, i.e. broad, exact, phrase, etc. Or the Ad Group or Campaign name. You either go without these or you populate them yourself when you specify the destination URLs to AdWords.
The dynamic values available in Google are:
{keyword}
This returns the keyword that triggered the display of the ad. In other words, the keyword or term that you’re paying for. Remember, it’s not going to tell you about broad/exact/phrase matching, so it’s slightly ambiguous unless you set up the destination URLs to contain this information, hard-coded.
{creative}
This populates your parameter with a 9-character ID for the version of the ad copy that was displayed to the searcher. This is potentially important if you are using variations of your ad copy. If you’re not, it’ll always be the same, at least for a given Ad Group. You can decipher the 9-character string using information obtained in reports directly from your Google AdWords account. You have to run an “ad text” report and check the “ad ID” box.
{ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}
This will populate the parameter with a C if the click came from Google’s Content Network, and an S if it came from the Search Network.
{ifContent:Contentnetwork}{ifSearch:Searchnetwork}
This is a variation. It will put a value of “Contentnetwork” if the click came from Google’s Content Network, and “Searchnetwork” if it came from the Search Network. You have control over what gets into the parameter value by changing what’s after the semicolon(:)
{placement}
This will return the web site where the ad was displayed, if and only if you are running a site-targeted type of campaign.
So …. The destination URL you specify for the Ad Group you call “Ad Group A” in the Google AdWords PPC program could be:
http://yoursite.com/yourpage.jsp?product=1235&color=blue&PPCprogram=GoogleAdWords&GoogleNetworkType={ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}&AdGroup=A&kw={keyword}&adID={creative}&SiteTargetingSiteName={placement}
And, if you choose to specify a different destination URL for each separate matchtype in AdWords’ setup, it can be, for a keyword you are setting up for an Exact Match:
http://yoursite.com/yourpage.jsp?product=1235&color=blue&PPCprogram=GoogleAdWords&GoogleNetworkType={ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}&AdGroup=A&kw={keyword}&adID={creative}&SiteTargetingSiteName={placement}&MatchType=Exact
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Thank you, i really appreciate this article and your help
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