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Posts Tagged ‘pay per click’
Nov 20
2009
It is a crime to have your AdWords campaigns on auto-pilot! 
Google AdWords Alert functionality allows you to proactively monitor your AdWords campaigns with custom alerts. Set your campaign criteria via custom alerts and AdWords will notify you within the account or via email.
Log into AdWords and Alerts will greet you and you are presented with changes to key performance indicators at a glance.
Increase Traffic with New Keywords Alert
Please note the keyword suggestions need careful review. Please take the time to review the keywords before adding, also consider giving feedback to AdWords regarding the relevancy of suggestions.
Custom Alerts
To support active monitoring of KPI fluctuations you want to track and take action on, email yourself the Alert. In the office or on the go, use the powerful AdWords Alerts to stay plugged in to your campaign performance.
Similar to the Google Analytics intelligence alerts, AdWords offers customizable alerts – thirteen alert types!
From Impressions to Conversion metrics, you can choose:
- metric
- operator
- comparison timeframe
- frequency of alert
- method of delivery
Powerful data formally requiring a manual investigation is now neatly delivered to your AdWords interface or email for quick action!
If you have a MCC, hang on because there is no alert access via MCC yet; you will have to log in to each account for Alert control.
See AdWords Alert blog post more details. This functionality is only available in the USA and a few other locations for now.
Happy Optimization!
Technorati Tags: google adwords, pay per click
Tags: google adwords, pay per click
Posted in pay per click | 3 Comments »
Feb 25
2009
Integrating lead information from one system such as Google Adwords into a CRM like Salesforce is definitely not a new topic, especially since the Salesforce-Google Adwords integration has been announced for a while now.
I want to highlight the steps required for a seamless integration, as well as a few additional pro-active steps you want to take to keep your Google Analytics data clean. The same concept would apply to other analytics tools you might be running. As Avinash always reminds us, data accuracy is always one of the biggest challenges in web analytics.
Here are my steps:
- Create Adwords and Salesforce accounts.
- Link Google AdWords with Salesforce.
- Exclude SalesForce parameters from Google Analytics.
- Set up AdWords lead tracking.
- View report.
1) Create Adwords and Salesforce accounts
You need to have a Google AdWords account and a Salesforce account before you can integrate them.
2) Link Google AdWords with Salesforce
- In Salesforce, click the Google AdWords Setup tab.
- Enter your AdWords customer ID and login e-mail.
3) Exclude SalesForce Parameters from Google Analytics
When Salesforce performs its integration with AdWords, it appends parameters (_kk and _kt) to all destination URLs in your AdWords account. We suggest that you strip these query parameters out of URL to insure no duplicate entries in your Top Content report.
To strip the query parameters, please follow these steps:
*A note for AdWords managers. Keep in mind that when Salesforce appends the destination URLs with its _kk parameters, this is actually “editing” your AdWords ads and the stats associated with these ads will now reset, according to how Google AdWords works.
4) Set up AdWords Lead Tracking
- Back in SalesForce, click on the Google AdWords Setup tab.
- Click on the “Set up Lead Tracking” button.
i – Create a Web-to-Lead Form
- Click on the “Create Web-to-Lead Form” button
- Add the form to your page
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" CONTENT="text/html;
charset=UTF-8">
.
.
.
<form action="https://www.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead?
encoding=UTF-8" method="POST">
<input type=hidden name="oid" value="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx">
<input type=hidden name="retURL"
value="http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html">
<label for="first_name">First Name</label><input id="first_name"
maxlength="40" name="first_name" size="20" type="text" /><br>
<label for="last_name">Last Name</label><input id="last_name"
maxlength="80" name="last_name" size="20" type="text" /><br>
<label for="email">Email</label><input id="email" maxlength="80"
name="email" size="20" type="text" /><br>
<input type="submit" name="submit">
</form>
ii – Add the Salesforce Tracking Code to the Website
Add the following tracking code to every page of your site right before the </BODY> tag
<!-- Begin Salesforce Tracking Code -->
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" src="https://lct.salesforce.com/sfga.js">
</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript">__sfga();</SCRIPT>
<!-- End Salesforce Tracking Code -->
iii – Test Your SalesForce installation
By clicking the “Test your Setup” you will be able to test the installation of the codes in step i and ii
5) View report
This report gives an overview of the leads submitted to SalesForce from your website
For more detailed information, click on each lead and learn more about the lead source
Technorati Tags: google adwords, google analytics, pay per click, qualitative analysis, salesforce, search engine marketing, web analytics
Tags: google adwords, google analytics, pay per click, qualitative analysis, salesforce, search engine marketing, web analytics
Posted in web analytics | 35 Comments »
Dec 19
2008
Urchin 6.5 was just released and we recommend you upgrade to take advantage of these new features:
- The best new feature: a Pay-per-Click (PPC) data manager lets you create PPC sources that automatically import cost data from Google Adwords.
- These PPC sources can then be applied to profiles as easily as you would apply log sources and filters!
- Currently, this feature does not work with the autotagging feature of Google Adwords.
- Urchin has been updated to show Chrome as a browser and Android as an operating system.
- The installer has been improved to make for a more seamless installation or upgrade.
- The Urchin configuration management utility has had its functionality extended.
- The geo database has been updated to December 2008 data.
- Some localization issues have been fixed.
- Urchin help topics (both internal to the application and in the online Urchin Help Center) have been updated.
Feel free to contact us for all your Urchin consulting needs.
You can also download Urchin from our Urchin software page.
Technorati Tags: google adwords, google chrome, pay per click, urchin, web analytics
Tags: google adwords, google chrome, pay per click, urchin, web analytics
Posted in web analytics | No Comments »
Dec 12
2008
In September of this year, Yahoo! announced the formation of a Digital Advisory Council to drive discussions with advertisers. Our agency was invited and we welcomed the invitation to listen to what Yahoo had to say and provide some feedback. Our office being literally less than ten minutes away made the decision a little bit easier!
During the meeting we were told that we are under an NDA so I won’t go into the specifics. But here are some comments and thoughts:
- We applaud Yahoo’s efforts to be open, reach out to their clients (advertisers and agencies), and solicit their input. That spirit was felt throughout the council meeting, from the Senior VP that hosted the event to managers and other Yahoo staff. They really wanted to be transparent and sought input from us. Good job, Yahoo!
- Despite the poor picture that might have been portrayed in the news about Yahoo and search, we were reminded that Yahoo! is still a profitable company and has some very high traffic sites, including Yahoo! Sports (we were told it has more traffic than ESPN) and Yahoo! News (gets more traffic than CNN). I didn’t know that and I would say it is pretty impressive!
- Various folks from Yahoo! presented about new features and innovations (sorry, can’t blog about it yet
 ) but expect to hear from Yahoo! on areas they are strong in, including Display (banner) Advertisement.
- There was a talk about Traffic Quality and the favorite discussion topic of click fraud. Without spilling their beans, we got a better picture of how Yahoo! handles click fraud and also learned that you can get reports from within your Yahoo! Search marketing account about credits your accounts is getting for false clicks.
- Lunch was really good too, including the Israeli Couscous which was very tasty! To be fair, I have to say that the food in Mountain View during the GAAC Summit was really good too.
So in summary, I am really glad to see Yahoo! opening up and creating additional forums to communicate with advertisers and agencies.
While we are on the subject of Yahoo! Search Marketing, there is another topic that we have been wanting to blog about but didn’t get to until now. Yahoo! has a mechanism of optimizing your accounts and campaigns on their own! Yes, that means without your
knowledge. Maybe this is not so recent but many clients I speak with are still not aware of this mechanism, so it is important that we share it. The following was drafted by a couple of folks in the office:
We hope you are aware of Yahoo’s decision to optimize PPC accounts by creating optimized campaigns on their own and running them without checking with the client. As strange as this may sound, it is very true! For a regular advertiser who doesn’t tag his campaigns and review them in any analytics tool, this may not be that bad. For those who do tag their campaigns and review all of their traffic sources and conversions via an analytics tool, this could be trouble.
Yahoo does the whole nine yards when it comes to campaign creation (naming convention, ad group, keywords, ad copy) but they miss a very crucial step. They don’t tag the campaign at all with tracking parameters so a web analytics tool can recognize it as PPC traffic. This means traffic from this new campaign will be recorded as organic traffic and will dilute the quality of your data. The number of visits attributed to Yahoo cpc and Yahoo organic will be wrong, and conversion rates for these two sources will be subject to speculation.
There are two ways that you can deal with this issue:
- If you would like to try these optimized campaigns and see how they will perform while capturing the data properly in your analytics account, you need to go to your Ads under the AdGroup they created and make sure that you tag the destination URLs properly. If you are using Google Analytics, here is a good post from our friends at PPC Hero that will help you.
- Otherwise, once you see a new optimized campaign in your account, pause or delete it and make sure that you opt-out from this service. You can opt-out by submitting a request to Yahoo customer support.
If you have too many campaigns in your own or your client’s accounts, the easiest way to spot the Yahoo optimized campaigns is by their naming convention. See the below snapshot for an example.
My request to Yahoo! is that they back out of this practice and allow user more control before they turn campaigns on and spend someone else’s money!
Technorati Tags: google analytics, pay per click, search engine marketing, web analytics, yahoo search marketing
Tags: google analytics, pay per click, search engine marketing, web analytics, yahoo search marketing
Posted in pay per click | No Comments »
Nov 17
2008
| Back in November of 2006, our friends at GA Experts posted a method to get detailed PPC keyword data from Google Analytics. This method involved creating a seperate profile and using some intimidating but powerful filters. I really liked and referenced this method because it isolated the changes to a single profile and didn’t involve any updates to the GA tracking code. Obviously I would prefer if this feature came built-in to GA but at least now you could get to some very useful data with very little work. |
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As Google Analytics was updated over time, the way the filters were using Custom Field 1 was no longer possible and so the profile broke. The smart folks over at ROI Revolution came up with another way to get to the exact PPC keyword data using the User Defined field and adding 2 lines to the GA tracking code. This was a great solution and probably suitable for a lot of people. However, I preferred not having to update the tracking code (this can be very difficult on some client sites), saving the User Defined field for other uses, and also being able to isolate the keyword extraction and concatenation to one profile.
I still see some blogs referring to the original method that doesn’t work anymore so one day I tried playing with the original filters approach and after 2 months of observing the data, it appears to be working correctly. Please follow these screenshots & instructions to give it a try for yourself.
Filter 1 – look at only paid traffic data.
- From your account, click on Filter Manager.
- Click on Add Filter.
- Give it a name such as Data Filter – PPC.
- Filter type is custom filter.
- Select on the Include option.
- The filter field should be Campaign Medium.
- The filter pattern can be cpc|ppc
- Click on Save Changes.
Filter 2 – extract the actual keyword that was typed and concatenate it to the paid keyword that was matched.
- Assuming you are still in the Filter Manager, click on Add Filter.
- Give it a name such as Data Filter – PPC Keywords.
- Filter type is custom filter.
- Select the Advanced option.
- Field A -> Extract A should be set to Referral and the value needs to be (\?|&)(q|p|query)=([^&]*)
- Field B -> Extract B should be set to Campaign Term and the value needs to be (.*)
- Output -> Constructor should be set to Campaign Term and the value needs to be $B1 – ($A3)
- Field A required, Field B required, and Override Output Field all need to be set to Yes.
Please click on the screenshot to view the full version.
Finally create a new profile with a name such as PPC Keywords Data and all your usual settings (default page, search settings, goals, etc). Make sure you apply these two new filters to it.
This method seems to work for Google, Yahoo, and MSN paid traffic. Below is a screenshot with sample results. Let me know if it works for you!
Technorati Tags: google analytics, msn adcenter, pay per click, search engine marketing, web analytics, yahoo search marketing
Tags: google analytics, msn adcenter, pay per click, search engine marketing, web analytics, yahoo search marketing
Posted in web analytics | 34 Comments »
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