Category — PPC

To account for the inevitable disrepancies between reports by my main analytics program and Google AdWords (and the other sponsored searches), I’ve done a lot of research including hit-by-hit comparisons. Here is my current list of reasons for discrepancies.

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.

However, in most cases you will want more useful PPC reporting than what WT.srch allows you. This post is about additional tracking parameters for PPC.

If you have a PPC (pay-per-click) search effort happening, you may be allowing the PPC engines to loosely match your paid-for terms with various terms typed in by human searchers.

To keep abreast of what’s being matched to what (and maybe identify inappropriate matches that can be avoided by adding negative search terms, or get ideas for cheaper exact-match terms), try this report.

Yahoo Pay-Per-Click (PPC) does a fantastic job of automatically adding tracking parameters to landing pages for your PPC ads.

You have to turn it on in the Yahoo PPC interface. Here’s how.