How to Track MSN Paid Search in Google Analytics

In my last article I introduced you to Google’s URL Builder and showed you how to track Yahoo paid search data from within Google Analytics. You should go back and read that article to understand what we are trying to do in this one (there is no need to repeat the entire thing here again.)

In this article I’ll show you how to do that same thing with MSN.

Quick Refresher

When fed the right data, Google Analytics can extract query string variables and then insert that into your analytics to provide better reporting capabilities—in this case relating specifically to paid search. Better reporting capabilities help you make more informed decisions about what marketing channels are working best for you.

Without this data, your MSN paid search traffic is grouped in Google Analytics with organic traffic, and that is not good. In short, not differentiating paid search from organic traffic does you absolutely no good what-so-ever.

Google’s URL Builder let’s you build a unique url that consists of data relating to your marketing efforts. You can then use this url, copy and pasting it into your MSN paid search ads as a destination url, to track varying amounts of information you could not get before. Here’s the example we used in that article:

• Landing page: www.ecommerceamplifier.com/
• Variables: Source = ‘MSN’ (or could be ‘Yahoo’), medium = ‘CPC’, term = ‘Ecommerce Coaching’, campaign = ‘Coaching Program’ and content = ‘Ecommerce Coaching National Ad’.
• Custom Tracking URL: http://www.ecommerceamplifier.com/?utm_source=MSN&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=ecommerce%2Bcoaching&utm_content=National%2BEcommerce%20Coaching%20Ad&utm_campaign=Ecommerce%2BAmplifier

Tracking MSN PPC With Google Analytics

Unlike both Google and Yahoo which require you to “flip a switch” to turn on (or off) url tagging, MSN requires you to do nothing—it’s automatically sent with each visitor.

Here’s what MSN sends:

• Query String {QueryString} – This is the raw search query that the user typed into the search box but it’s as close as you’re gonna get to automating the process of bringing your adCenter keywords into your Google Analytics reports.
• Match Type {MatchType} – Represents basic information that will tell you if the triggered keyword was broad, phrase or exact matched (can help you narrow the exact keyword down.)
• OrderItemID {OrderItemID} – Represents the keyword that triggered the display of your ad.
• AdID {AdID} – Represents the numeric id that MSN assigns to your ad variations.

The items listed in brackets ‘{ }’ above represent the variable data that MSN sends your way with each visitor. It is this information that we will plug back into our URL to track performance.

The two parameters that represent keywords are {OrderItemID} and {QueryString}. Depending on your preference, you may use either in the location of utm_term in your Google Analytics built url. The difference is that the first one {OrderItemID} represents the actual keyword you bid on and the second {QueryString} represents the actual raw search terms the visitor entered to get to your site.

Now, if opting for {QueryString} as your parameter of choice, understand that the search terms might not exactly match the keyword(s) you are bidding on—thus, in this case, you may want to consider adding the {MatchType} to the url string as well. This can help distinguish in Google Analytics if the search string is actually the keyword itself (i.e. exact match) or a variation of it (in the case or broad match). I do not use this method myself but wanted to point out what you need to consider if you are going one way or the other. We’re looking for data that provides valuable information remember.

I prefer to know the exact keywords that triggered the ad and use the {OrderItemID} as my ‘Campaign Term’.

The screenshot below shows what MSN (as of this writing) has listed for what each variable represents:

Now, when we use these in conjunction with Google’s URL Builder we get something that looks like this screenshot below:

This is the best way to get data at the keyword level, ad level and campaign level (although you’ll have to compare the AD ID with that in MSN Adcenter to determine which ad actually triggered the visit.)

Now, another method you might want to consider (although not one I’ve personally used yet) is to replace the ‘Campaign Name’ data with something like {QueryString} to gather even more information on your visitors actual search habits who use MSN.

When would this be a viable option? Well, if you only have one campaign setup within MSN Adcenter then you may not really feel you need that information again in analytics (after all, if you have only one campaign setup then all traffic must originate from that.) In this case it might be beneficial to determine the search habits of your visitors in relation to the actual keyword that triggered the ad to find out more opportunities you might be missing.

Either way, you now have access to tracking paid search traffic from MSN within Google Analytics and because of it, have opened up new doors that will help you make more informed decisions about your marketing efforts.

How to Track Yahoo Paid Search in Google Analytics

If you want to really take your business to the next level you must have an analytics system in place that provides you with data which can help you make informed decisions. By informed decisions I don’t mean “oh, my visitors use ‘xxx’ browser” or “the screen resolution of most visitors is ‘xxx’”. Sure, these elements might be useful to a very small degree if, and only if, you are looking at ensuring your site is designed to meet the right audience.

But, if you did your homework, your site should already be designed to fit any visitor that arrives, no matter the platform, browser type, screen resolution, or what ever it is you come up with relating to design.

Now there are many flavors of analytics that may work for your needs. In this article I am going to focus on Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s powerful, and it flat out can get the job done.

So, we’re talking Google Analytics setup to provide us with valuable decision making data. To get this type of information, just installing Google Analytics alone is not going to be enough. You need to take advantage of the full tracking capabilities to provide you with data from all your advertising channels. This will help you understand where to invest your time and resources to optimize a given channel—ideally that which provides a positive ROI.

I’ve written about Google Analytics in a number of past articles and discussed the ecommerce tracking, goal / funnel tracking, etc… so I won’t go into that in this article (although in future articles I will revisit these areas as much has changed in GA since the writing of those.)

In this article I am going to talk about tracking paid search traffic channels, specifically from Yahoo (Search Marketing).

As anyone running paid search campaigns might have already gathered, it’s fairly easy to track Adwords traffic in Google Analytics when you link the two and flip the proper auto-tagging switches, but it’s not so easy to track paid search traffic from Yahoo (or MSN for that matter but that topic is for my next article.)

Yes, Yahoo offers its own ppc tracking tools—including its own form of analytics. However, anyone that wants to find out from within Google Analytics how their paid search traffic from Yahoo is performing, has to do a little work.

In fact, currently—for those of you not already separating this out within your analytics—your paid search traffic from Yahoo (and again, MSN) comes over mixed with the organic traffic and is listed as such within Analytics. This isn’t good.

This is a problem. How can you make informed decisions about which channel of traffic provides the biggest bang for your buck when it’s mixed with organic. You can’t—at least not real easily.

So to track paid search traffic from MSN and Yahoo we need to separate them using the link itself and the variables we can pass to native Google Analytics. In short we need to develop a proper URL structure that we can use from within our MSN and Yahoo paid search ads themselves. These links must contain information which passes data to Google Analytics about the origin of that traffic.

The official term is called URL Tagging. Sounds complicated yes, and it could be, if it weren’t for this handy little tool that Google provides.

It’s called the URL Builder.

The URL Builder gives us the power to fill in a few fields click a button, and return a pre-built URL that we can use within our ppc campaigns. These would represent what are known as the Destination URL’s for a given keyword (you do break your destination URL’s down to the keyword level right? Doing so gives you more control and if you’re not, you should be.)

Let’s dive in and show you how you can gather keyword level data from Yahoo paid search, but one last thing you may be wondering before we do.

If you are wondering whether you need to provide a unique URL for each keyword the answer is no. Yahoo by default passes variable information to you with each visitor. All you need to know is what they pass and what to grab to insert into your analytics. That’s what I’m going to show you here.

Google’s URL Builder

Here’s is a crash course in Google’s URL Builder:

The URL Builder let’s you enter your landing page (website URL) and associated variables including source (search engine), medium (cpc vs. email, organic, etc…), term (your keyword), content (ad version), and name (your campaign). After completing the form, the URL Builder provides you with a full tracking URL that you can copy/paste into your Yahoo or MSN ads. Here’s an example:

• Landing page: www.ecommerceamplifier.com/
• Variables: Source = ‘Yahoo’ (or could be ‘MSN’), medium = ‘CPC’, term = ‘Ecommerce Coaching’, campaign = ‘Coaching Program’ and content = ‘Ecommerce Coaching National Ad’.
• Custom Tracking URL: http://www.ecommerceamplifier.com/?utm_source=Yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=ecommerce%2Bcoaching&utm_content=National%2BEcommerce%20Coaching%20Ad&utm_campaign=Ecommerce%2BAmplifier

Tracking Yahoo PPC With Google Analytics

First thing we need to do to get Yahoo to send us the data we are after is to turn on auto-tagging from within your Yahoo Search Marketing account or you’ll get nothing but the keyword coming over (and that doesn’t help a whole lot on its own.)

To do this you’ll need to login to your YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) account and go to:

Administration > Tracking URLs

Once that is complete Yahoo will begin to pass a lot more data than just the keyword over in the query string and we’ll be able to retrieve that data from within Google Analytics.

The parameters identifiers that Yahoo uses to pass various paid search data in the query string are:

• {OVKEY} representing the keyword
• {OVADID} representing the ad itself
• {OVCAMPGID} representing the campaign itself

Inserting these parameters into the utm_term, utm_content, and utm_campaign sections of your URL, you’ll be able to successfully pull the keyword you bid on, the ad it came from, and the campaign that held the ad into Google Analytics.

So going back to the above example (bullet points) the url for Yahoo would look like this after we inserted the parameters:

http://www.ecommerceamplifier.com/?utm_source=Yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={OVKEY}&utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}

Notice in place of the term, content, and campaign level data we entered earlier there are now Yahoo specific parameters that fill the string with dynamic data.

That’s all you need to do to begin to track the information on Yahoo paid search in Google Analytics. In the next article I’ll show you how to do the same thing using MSN Adcenter and after that one show you how to drill down on this data from within Google Analytics to find out what it’s all telling you.

Don’t be afraid to use this same strategy to track all kinds of marketing activity. Using this technique you can track email campaigns, banner advertising, or just about anything else you can imagine.

Google Introduces Adwords Comparison Ads

Google has been on a streak lately with new releases (just in time for the holidays).

Recently they introduced comparison ads for Adwords. Think of it as “Comparison Shopping” but directly built into the ads themselves (photos and more details at the above link.)

Currently, Comparison Ads will only show to a small number of users in select U.S. states and is only available to a limited number of advertisers in the mortgage/refinance space, but this is something that as it develops would be very interesting to see where it goes.

Still in the early stage, Comparison Ads attempts to focus on improving the user experience through:

• Speed — Comparison Ads shows targeted offers in less than a second. There are no long forms for users to fill out – Users see specific offers immediately and only need to fill in additional information if they wish to further refine their results.
• Transparency — Comparison Ads only shows real products. There are no teaser rates, or bait and switch offers. Comparison Ads also standardizes the information presented to users, making it easy for them to sort and compare offers on a side by side basis.
• Privacy — Comparison Ads won’t send advertisers any user information, including anonymized phone numbers, unless the user explicitly requests more information about an advertiser’s offer.

Google says that Comparison Ads let users compare multiple, relevant offers more easily and help target your offers at a more granular level, leading to more valuable, qualified leads.

Not sure how this will play out over time but it seems worth watching.

Google Commerce Search Unveiled

This is something new and I have not tried it yet but I still thought it was interesting enough to bring forward here.

Google recently unveiled a new Ecommerce Search Solution. It looks to be geared toward big ecommerce retailers and the pricing scheme for it will depend on the number of products/items on businesses’ data feed and search queries.

The Official Google Blog says Commerce Search aims to make the otherwise cumbersome task of searching for products on e-commerce sites easier and more fun.

The features Commerce Search provides are as follows:

• Lightning fast Google searching technology applied to retailers databases enabling consumers to find the right products in a snap
• Scalable hosted solution that aims to increase seasonal query volume
• Search refinement functionality that can automatically generate groupings based on user query and matching items
• Easily manageable product promotions that provides complete control to marketers and e-commerce site administrators
• Full customization option for controlling how products are displayed on search results landing pages
• No additional adminstrative cost for deployment and maintenance
• Customized reporting and statistical analysis via integrated Google Analytics

Information on Commerce Search it can be found here:

http://www.google.com/commercesearch/

If anyone has had any experience with this new tool I’d love to hear about it. What are your thoughts?

Using Google Site Search to Improve Your Adwords Campaigns

I touched upon site search quite a while back in a previous post of mine titled How to Read Your Visitors Minds with 100% Accuracy. In that post I went into detail on how you can use site search to understand what your customers want.

I found this video from the folks over at Google and think it’s a nice extension to that post. The video takes the concept I presented earlier a step further and applies that to improving your pay per click advertising conversion.

Now, I’m not saying that this method is the best way to go to improve your ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend). It’s a nice way of researching and gathering more information about what keywords you might want to consider (or combinations thereof) but don’t use it as the end all be all.

For example, in the video we see that one of the top search queries recorded was “shirt”. I would never buy a word like this alone as it is too broad—even if you do sell shirts. I would consider (if you are not already doing it) however, bidding on something like “blue short sleeved oxford shirt” (as an example).

I believe that using site search as a research tool for your business is extremely smart. It opens the doors to your customers mindset. I saying this, I also think it can come in handy for determining how you might want to consider expanding your current paid search campaigns. Just be careful you do your homework after you gather the data to ensure the words you choose provide the best opportunity at achieving a positive ROI.

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