Tracking

Testing and tracking your PPC campaign to see how things go after you’ve got it up and running is the best way to ensure you find out what works and what doesn’t so you can make some money here. To accurately measure the success of any PPC campaign, you need to implement tracking measures that will let you observe the click-through rates, hits, and conversions.

Your goal is to track which actions (clicks) produce the desired goal (a sale, or at least a hit on your landing page). Once you’ve determined that, then you can reproduce it to make more sales, and you will have an all-important edge in the game: making more money from the same amount of traffic. That edge means you can devote more of your PPC budget to things that actually work, getting you higher ad placements, more traffic, and ultimately more money. And the more you refine your campaign, the better it works.

Writing two or three different ads for each keyword grouping is part of that. By having several different ads to look at for the same keywords, you can do what’s called split-testing. This is the easiest testing and tracking for you to implement because the function is built right into your PPC engine account. The PPC engines will count how many clicks each ad gets, and show you your click-through rate so you can determine which are doing better. Your click-through rate is calculated simply by taking how many times the ad was delivered and diving it by how many
times it was actually clicked on. So, if your ad was delivered 100 times and one person clicked on it, your CTR would be 1%.

You can split-test as many ads as you want per keyword grouping at a time, but to really be able to focus on what you’re doing, it’s likely best to keep it down to two or three. Once each of your ads collect a certain number of hits (say, 100), you can see which is the “winner” and then create a new ad to try to beat that winning score. Eventually, you will end up with ads for each keyword grouping that produce consistent results.

Another thing to track with your keywords is actual conversions. If you can’t tell which keyword groupings are the ones that are translating into sales, then you’re going to keep paying for the ones that aren’t. Not all keywords convert equally, so don’t pay for the ones that are wasting your money. If you’ve grouped your keywords tightly, then you can go ahead and track this at the ad group level.

You can accomplish all of your basic (and many not-so-basic) testing and tracking needs with Google Analytics. If you are using Google AdWords, sign up right away, since AdWords integrates closely with Analytics and will produce easy-to readand easy-to-study reports. It’s free and feature-heavy, and therefore a pretty invaluable resource. The reports will show you which ads are translating into actual sales, and you can adjust accordingly. Analytics also works well for split-testing landing pages and more.

Even if you are using Yahoo! Search Marketing or MSN AdCenter, you can still use Analytics to track, and though it takes a little more effort, it’s worth it. Here’s how to do it for Yahoo:

• Open up the Google Analytics URL Builder.

• Input all of the data it asks for – your landing page url (if you’re using one), term (keyword), the name (the campaign), the source (the search engine, which is, in this case, Yahoo!), the medium (in this case, CPC), content (fill that in so you can differentiate between other ads).

• Click on the “generate url” button to get the custom url.

• Copy/paste the custom url into your Yahoo! ads to track it in Analytics. Your custom url will look something like this:

http://www.example.com/custom.html?utm_source=Yahoo&utm_medium=CPCutm_term=trackingutm_content=testutm_campaign=Custom%2BTracking

This example only works if you want to make a custom url for each and every keyword you have running. After you get the hang of it, though, you can use Yahoo’s auto-tags to make the process much faster. To make use of that, log into your Yahoo account and make sure the tracking URLs function is turned on under the Administration  Tracking URLs tabs, which will tell Yahoo to start taking note of information for you, such as the search query, the keyword you bid on itself, and more. Then you just need to append the URL you created above with new variables, like {OVKEY} for the paid keyword, {OVADID} for the ad text ID number, {OVCAMPGID} for the campaign ID number, and {OVRAW} for the
actual search query.

When you’re done swapping things out, the new URL will look something like this:

http://www.example.com/custom.html?utm_source=Yahoo&utm_medium=CPC&utm_term={OVKEY}&utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}

Just remember to turn auto-tagging on in your Yahoo account or it won’t work!  The process is very similar if you want to track your MSN AdCenter ads with Google Analytics, with just the variables being different. With AdCenter, you also do not need to turn tracking on like you did with Yahoo, because this is already on by default. For AdCenter ads, the basic variables will be {QueryString} for the term, {AdID} for content, and {OrderItemID} for the campaign, giving you a link that looks something like this: http://www.example.com/custom.html?utm_source=Yahoo&utm_medium=CPC&utm_term={QueryString}&utm_content={AdID}&utm_campaign={OrderItemID}

If you are using a landing page approach, then you’ll want to test different pages – different copy and different graphics – to see which make you more sales. Insert an Analytics tracking url into each page to see how they stack up against each other, and after they’ve gathered a number of hits, look to see which is the winner and work from there. Analytics urls also work wonderfully for blogs. Later on down the line, when you are more experienced with Pay Per Click advertising and how to test and track, you may wish to implement a different tracking system, such as a PHP based script, or even outsource it to a company that specializes in such things, but for now, Google Analytics is your best bet.