Up until now, I have kept my topics largely centered around leveraging baseline server statistics. Today, however, I wanted to address some of the capabilities of more enterprise level web statistics packages in getting the most out of your Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns.
If you have a search engine marketing company doing this for you already, please read no further. However, if you have the time, resources and inclination to tackle running a PPC campaign by yourself, please follow along.
In the first part of this series I talked on a high level about tracking your campaigns, and today I wanted to drill down a bit deeper for the PPC experts to be. I've said it before and will say it again, if you're not performing analytics on your paid search campaigns, then you're wasting money, plain and simple. Whether you choose to use the increasingly robust free options for analytics, or something more extensive like Clicktracks or Omniture, you can also choose how in depth you choose to go with your analytics. But you have to start somewhere.
I find the easiest method for getting some useful information out of your campaigns is to set up tracking segments based around ad groups. To do this, you'll need to lay out some pretty tightly defined ad groups, I like to keep it under ten terms that all lead to one landing page. Make sure to add parameters to your URL destinations that identify the campaign source (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) as well as the name of the ad group. Once your groups are defined in each engine, you can go to your analytics tool and create your segments. Typically, this is done by defining the landing page based on the parameters set up in your campaigns. Here you have the freedom to set more general segments, such as all Google traffic or all Yahoo traffic. Or, if you utilize the same ad groups, you can gauge performance for specific ad groups regardless of engine. If you really want to get granular, you can create segments for each keyword.
With all of this information defined, then it's just a matter of what you want to look at. Setting appropriate KPIs and tracking them is vital if you want to succeed in the world of paid search. Monitor bounce rate, time on site, page views, conversions, scenarios, and user paths for ad groups and keywords. It's a cliché, but knowledge is power, and the more you track the more informed decisions you can make in where to push harder with your PPC campaigns and where and when to pull back.
The author of this article is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, a Michigan search engine optimization, paid search management and web analytics company.
If you have a search engine marketing company doing this for you already, please read no further. However, if you have the time, resources and inclination to tackle running a PPC campaign by yourself, please follow along.
In the first part of this series I talked on a high level about tracking your campaigns, and today I wanted to drill down a bit deeper for the PPC experts to be. I've said it before and will say it again, if you're not performing analytics on your paid search campaigns, then you're wasting money, plain and simple. Whether you choose to use the increasingly robust free options for analytics, or something more extensive like Clicktracks or Omniture, you can also choose how in depth you choose to go with your analytics. But you have to start somewhere.
I find the easiest method for getting some useful information out of your campaigns is to set up tracking segments based around ad groups. To do this, you'll need to lay out some pretty tightly defined ad groups, I like to keep it under ten terms that all lead to one landing page. Make sure to add parameters to your URL destinations that identify the campaign source (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) as well as the name of the ad group. Once your groups are defined in each engine, you can go to your analytics tool and create your segments. Typically, this is done by defining the landing page based on the parameters set up in your campaigns. Here you have the freedom to set more general segments, such as all Google traffic or all Yahoo traffic. Or, if you utilize the same ad groups, you can gauge performance for specific ad groups regardless of engine. If you really want to get granular, you can create segments for each keyword.
With all of this information defined, then it's just a matter of what you want to look at. Setting appropriate KPIs and tracking them is vital if you want to succeed in the world of paid search. Monitor bounce rate, time on site, page views, conversions, scenarios, and user paths for ad groups and keywords. It's a cliché, but knowledge is power, and the more you track the more informed decisions you can make in where to push harder with your PPC campaigns and where and when to pull back.
The author of this article is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, a Michigan search engine optimization, paid search management and web analytics company.
