In this guide you’ll learn:

• What URL tracking is
• Why you should be tagging all of your destination URLs
• The types of Analytics URL tagging
• How to track outside PPC data in analytics (Bing, Facebook, etc.)
• Other uses for URL tagging and tracking

Because we have a good amount of clients, the amount of touch time I have with each is extremely valuable, putting an emphasis on efficiency. With that said, I typically need to dig a little deeper because our staff is extremely talented, which makes it difficult for me to poke holes in their existing strategies. I’ve found that the most loyal tool in my analysis arsenal is the AdWords graph feature (And AdCenter’s now that they’ve added this). It’s always the start of any diagnosis I’m conducting. It allows me to quickly sort through and visualize large data sets at many levels of granularity and at several different periods of time. What I’m looking for with this information are trends. I want to identify changes in the account and draw attention to significant or subtle changes in the account that can be acted upon. Here are some examples of graph settings I look at and what I’m looking for in each:

Year Over Year CPL Performance:

AdWords Graph | Year-Over-Year Data

I take a look at year over year performance to have a better understanding of seasonality and how far an account has come in the past 12 months. The above chart is a branded AdGroup. You can see that 2012 January performance on cost per conversion is considerably better than 2011. Not only is it better, it’s also more consistent as the line is more flat than previous years. These are the types of results I want to see and are something that is valuable to show a client, especially on accounts with a high level of seasonality where month over month stats may vary. This chart only shows part of the performance though. To get a full understanding of the performance you need to start swapping the first metric:

Year-Over-Year Cost Performance:

AdWords Graph | Year-Over-Year Cost

This is a shot of the same AdGroup but looking at cost. What this allows me to see is that, while CPL did improve dramatically on the previous chart, spend actually decreased. Sometimes true performance can be clouded by the performance of metrics and drawing out additional information could allow me to better understand what is happening on an account. An assumption I can make here, and one that took only a few seconds, is that CPL performance improved because this account manager “cut out the fat.” The manager probably reduced spend on keywords that weren’t working and probably invested more heavily in the keywords that were working, which allowed her to spend more efficiently and produce a lower CPL. To prove this, I’ll need to look at one more metric for year-over-year.

Year-Over-Year Conversion Performance:

AdWords Graph | Year-Over-Year Conversions

Here’s that same AdGroup with the same date range on conversions. As you can see, 2012 is actually driving more conversions than 2011. This is what ties it all together and proves to me that optimizations over the past year have resulted in significant improvements in account performance for this branded AdGroup. This account manager is driving a significantly higher volume of leads for a significantly lower cost, resulting in higher budget efficiency. Now I can go give her a high five. Plus, it took me less than a minute to run through this entire process. I could scrub the entire account at the ad group level (30 AdGroups) in this manner in less than 10 minutes. With that said, looking at year over year data isn’t necessarily enough to have a full understanding of the accounts performance. From here, I’ll go into a six month trend analysis, starting with:

Clicks Versus Cost Per Click:

AdWords Graph | Clicks Versus Cost-Per-Click

Now I’m at the account level and I’ve stretched my date range back about six months. The first thing I want to see is how the account was managed from peak season, which on this account is August, through their slow season, which on this account is December. I already know that on this account, budget is reduced through the slow season and they are limited by budget so there is no shortage of opportunities to find clicks. What this report is showing me is that cost-per-click shrank in relation to overall clicks. I assume that this was a tactic to mitigate a loss of traffic by lowering position and driving more volume for each dollar. During the high months, I’d imagine position was raised to gain more exposure and relevance when people are buying. I’ll confirm this by swapping cost per click for average position, which I did and the graph confirmed my assumed results. Now I want to know if the strategy paid off.

Conversions versus Cost:

AdWords Graph | Conversions Versus Cost

Here’s where things get interesting on this account. As you can see in the business months at the start of the graph, the relationship of conversions and cost was close; high conversions and high cost. In the slower months a gap forms where conversions are peaking out considerably higher than cost. This shows better efficiency in the slow months, which we already noticed on the AdGroup graphs earlier. You can also see towards the end of this graph that the trend converges again as we head into January, which is one of this clients busier months. What this arms me with, is the ability to realign strategy with the client and walk them through the progression of their account. The best part is, I don’t actually push buttons or pull levers in this account and I’ve got the trend and strategy over the past six months pegged in about 15 minutes worth of research.

Performance on this account was outstanding so there wasn’t much for me to dig deep into but a similar analysis using only graphs on another account could uproot some items that need immediate attention. When I find trends that don’t look great to me, I zoom in on the date ranges in question and start doing a comparative analysis of the time period directly preceding the goof. It’s then that I’ll start looking at overall metrics to see what shifted and I’ll analyze change history reports to see if it was user caused. If so, we can easily go back and revert to the previous state and pick up with a new optimization. Analyzing accounts doesn’t always take a long time but you should make a habit of analyzing your accounts on a short-term and long-term basis regularly. If you only stay within the day, week, or month, you might be losing site of just how much your account is changing.

First, let’s look at the data available for a leads-based client. In AdWords on the Campaigns tab, here are the headers I see in my report data:

I have outlined the conversion metrics in the red box on the right side of the menu. Conversions, cost per conversion and conversion rate are fairly straightforward, and likely very familiar to you. You’ll notice that in this particular account I’m only being shown data for conversions that happen once per click. I’ll come back to what this means a little later when we dive into an ecommerce account, but I just wanted to point it out here first. The last column for view-through conversions is probably the least familiar to you. View through conversions are the number of online conversions that happen in any specified time frame after a user saw your image or rich media ad on the Display Network, but didn’t click. Translation: they saw your ad, didn’t click, but converted later without clicking on another Display Network ad.

View-through conversion data can be extremely helpful in creating strategy for your Display Network campaigns. This information can help you determine the most effective placements on the Display Network, and can help you optimize your campaigns based on how people are engaging with your ads even if they aren’t clicking. In other words, just because someone doesn’t immediately click your ad doesn’t mean it’s not effective or memorable.

To get the most out of your view-through conversions, you’ll want to make sure you’re de-duplicating your data. De-duplication is a feature in AdWords that, if enabled, will exclude conversions from users that viewed your display ad but later clicked on your search ad. If this setting is disabled you’ll have to take your view-through conversions with a grain of salt, as you could be getting duplicate conversion counts. So, you’re much better off to enable de-deplication.

To enable de-duplication, go the the Reporting and Tools menu in AdWords and choose Conversions from the drop down list. Once on the Conversions page, select the settings tab from the tabs on your screen and you’ll see the link to edit/enable your de-duplication option:

Now let’s look at an account tracking conversions for an ecommerce client. As you’ll see below, my report information offers me more varied conversion data:

As I mentioned above, I have my conversion data for one-per-click conversions, but now I also have conversion data for many clicks (the fifth and sixth columns above). What does this mean? One-per-click conversions count a conversion for every single click on your ad. If multiple conversions happen after the click,  one-per click conversion reporting will still only report one. Obviously this data is more useful for leads-based client accounts, as it is unlikely that you’d be asking a user to convert in more than one way. Leads-based accounts would count things like filling out a contact form as a conversion, or signing up for an e-newsletter, and these things only need to happen once. It is important to note, however, that you can track multiple types of conversion actions (downloads, signing up for a newsletter, requesting more information, etc.),. Viewing data on conversions by purpose or action name is available on the Dimensions tab:

For more information about defining different conversion types, visit this page in Google AdWords Help online.

Many-per-click conversion data will count multiple conversions per click. This information is useful for tracking conversions that have individual value every time they occur, like an ecommerce purchase. So, one user click can generate multiple conversions (purchases).

You’ll also notice columns for the value of each conversion for both one-per-click and many clicks, which is another useful metric for ecommerce accounts. This is actually pretty simple information, as it’s just the average value, or dollar amount, of each conversion/purchase. While this would generally only show up in ecommerce accounts, you can also assign a dollar value to other lead types, so you’d be able to track this for other conversion types as well. Please note that if you want to assign a value for you conversions you’ll need to make sure the conversion code on your site is also modified. For more information about setting up this information, check out Google’s help page on goals and funnels.

Lastly, the final column provides the total conversion value, which is the total value of all the conversions for a given date range divided by the total cost for all clicks. In other words, this column is showing you your ROI.

To sum all this up, here’s a brief overview of everything I explained above:

• View-through conversions – number of conversions that happen within 30 days after a user saw, but did not immediately click, your ad on the Display Network
• Conversions (1-per-click) – count conversions per one click (multiple conversions after the one click are not counted)
• Conversions (many click) – count conversions every time one is made, i.e. will count multiple conversions per click
• Value/conv. – average dollar amount of your conversions/transactions
• Total conversion value – ROI (value/cost)
• Conversion purpose/action – the specific type of conversion you’re asking users to perform (newsletter sign-up, catalog request, contact information, etc.)

I hope this helps you make more sense of your AdWords conversion tracking, and also helps you dive a little more deeply into your PPC accounts. Will this information help you report on your conversions more thoroughly? Let us know in the comments below.

As always, thanks for reading and stay tuned for more from PPC Hero!

The answer, my friend might be blowing in the wind, but it’s also within Hal Varian’s head and has been for quite a while. Let’s review. Way back in April, the Inside Adwords blog posted a note from Hal, which said: “there are two interpretations of the phrase “ad position.” The “page position” refers to the location on the page, such as “top ad 2” or “right-hand side ad 1.” The “auction position” is the rank of the ad in the auction that determines the order of the ads on the page. The critical point is that the reported average position metric is based on auction position, not page position.”

What that means? It means that a lot of the nonsensical things that you’ve seen happen when you fight to raise your average position with bid changes aren’t so nonsensical after all.

For example, if you move from position 1 on the Side to position 1 on the Top via a bid change, your reported average position in the past would not have changed. You would have been very confused as to why your performance changed when average position remained constant.

Additionally, because bid increases can make you eligible to win an appearance in more auctions, some bid changes can actually make your average position decrease. Again, if your performance changed either for the better or worse for a keyword, you had no idea why that had happened.

So how can you apply top vs. side segmentation to bring order to your little ad-position world and solve these mysteries? Let’s see.

Average position for this keyword is 3.2, all right. Maybe in the past, I’d want to bid up on this keyword if my cost/conv was okay. But: look! I don’t need to bid up to appear in 1.9 for the Top results. And will bidding up increase my position from 5.3 on the Side, or just qualify me to appear for additional queries and leave my position that low? Depending on my performance for each, I can decide if bidding up on this keyword is really something of value, or will harm rather than help me. Conversely, if I have a very high Top position, I may be able to bid down on this keyword without substantial impact on leads if my cost per conversion is a bit too high.

After you make bid changes, you can compare average position, CPC, and other metrics for two date ranges (one pre and one post bid changes) to determine the actual impact of your changes. Especially for broad match keywords, an increase in impressions after a bid change that comes from Side-shown ads may mean you are opening yourself up to traffic from additional queries; in this case it may be important to use a search query report to analyze the relevance of the traffic being driven by that keyword post-bid-change to ensure that it remains high and that the impression increase is actually useful to you.

Maybe in the future there will be segmented targeting or bidding options available based on this difference, and that’d be handy. But for the time being, it’s useful to use this segmentation to make bidding decisions and analyze comparative performance before and after changes.

Google Voice is Google’s way of helping you to consolidate your phone numbers. As shown in the basic introductory video supplied here, Google Voice takes all of your telephone devices, and allows you to assign one phone number that connects to all, some, or none of them. Google Voice gives you many personalization options, such as the ability to choose a custom phone number (even ones that spell out your company’s name, for instance), to be able to choose a different area code than the ones attached to your other phones, the ability to block certain people or area codes from calling you, and also allows you to pick a personalized voicemail greeting. Also, Google Voice will take your voicemails and transcribe them to text to be saved in a Gmail-esque inbox online, which makes it easy to sort your messages and access them in an easier interface.  And to top it all off, it works on all the major smart phones as well as an app. Without the addition of Adwords, this is already worth a look from a business standpoint—you can personalize how people contact you, and also remain easily connected to your business lines from anywhere.

So Google Voice is already something you should look into as a business. But much like how Google operates, there is much more planned in the future. Google Voice and Google Adwords have announced that the two applications will be having a merger of sorts. Basically, Google Voice will allow you to track the calls that your ads are generating by adding a phone number to the bottom of each of your ads, and it is going to be called Google Call Metrics. This eliminates the need to hassle your customers with questions about how they found the number, how they heard of your business, etc.  Google plans on doing this by utilizing the ability to reassign your phone numbers to one single Google phone number. So, you can create a phone number that is easy to remember or spells out your name (easier is better for most potential consumers) and assign it to an ad group or campaign. This number will appear either at the top or bottom of your ad text, and won’t count against you in the already hard to appease character count rules. So, when someone sees your ad, they see the number to call as well. This counts as a conversion for your ad, and Google will track multiple statistics about these conversion calls, such as duration, which ad triggered the call, and also how much revenue came from the call. Much more is undoubtedly coming as well.

In addition to this, Google Voice and Adwords are making it easier for mobile devices to access your ads. Google Voice is now available for all major smart phone types, and your ads, which only display phone numbers for laptops and desktops, can be called directly from the phone just by clicking the number in the mobile phone’s browser. This may not seem like an epic innovation, but it does make it easier for the potential customer to contact you, and removing any barriers to a conversion will undoubtedly result in more conversions and more exposure for your client/business.

This combination of Google Voice and Adwords opens up many future possibilities for your advertising campaigns. To start, Google will not be charging for the calls that your ads are generating as they do for clicks. This will change after Call Metric’s wide scale implementation, but for now you can generate much more revenue without much more cost to your campaigns. Also, you can tailor specific phone numbers to your clientele, or to what campaigns are converting the most. Funny or creative phone numbers aside, being able to give your ad’s phone number an area code that either corresponds to a place that gives you great business, or is easy to remember can help more people to call, and can minimize caller mistakes in the dialing process. Also, this area code factor combined with campaign level geotargetting can give you the advertiser much more ability to tailor ads specifically to who you are trying to target. Basically, Google Voice combined with Adwords gives you a whole new level of customization for your ad campaigns.

So to summarize, you will be able to more accurately gauge the impact that your Adwords campaign has outside of online sales. You will be able to track the number of phone calls that your client gets through the Adwords interface, and won’t be left in the dark as to how people are hearing about your client/business without the corresponding click data.  Also, if this is implemented correctly on your end, you will be able to show a much-improved ROI to your client. So be on the lookout for Google Call Metrics, and while you’re at it, get on Google Voice!

So what happens when you launch a new landing page and things are not tracking correctly, what can you do? Did you inherit an account and things aren’t looking quite right? In order to pinpoint the issue, there are a series of steps you can go through to try and fix the problem and get back on track.

1. Try submitting a test and make sure your form is working correctly. This is a crucial step anytime you change something in your account that impacts tracking – always submit a test lead to be sure it is working. This seems basic, but it is a step that is often overlooked. Once you load the URLs into your PPC account, click through the process yourself. After you do, confirm that the lead or conversion is showing up in not only the PPC system but also in the client’s system. Did the submission go through fine but you don’t see a lead in your PPC accounts? Move on down the list to try one of the other suggestions. If the lead does not show up in the client’s system, then you need to work with them to trouble shoot URLs along with other possible issues.

2. If your PPC accounts are not tracking conversions correctly, check the page code. Pull the conversion tracking code from Google, Yahoo and MSN (see below on where to find the code) and make sure that the code is on the conversion page. Make sure that not only every piece of the code is there (I have seen some CMS systems cut off part of the code), but also that it is placed appropriately and is on the correct page. Depending on your conversion process, the page the code is added may vary but often it is the thank you or similar page after the person hits “submit”.

Google

To find the conversion code in Google, go to the reporting tab and drop down to “Conversions”. Make sure there is a Conversion tag set up, if not, you will need to create one. If you need the code for an existing conversion, click on the action name and then click on the “code” tab. There you should find the tracking code about halfway down the page. If sending the code to developers or clients, it is best to copy and paste this into a text file rather than in the body of an email so you can be sure nothing is lost during the send.

Yahoo

From the Administration tab, click on “Analytics” in the sub-menu. If you have already activated the tracking, you will see the option you chose and the tracking code at the bottom of the page. If you have not activated tracking, choose either Conversion Only Analytics or Full Analytics (descriptions of each on the page) and once the option is set, you should see the code at the bottom.

MSN

Once logged into an account, click on any campaign. At the top of the page, click on the link for “change settings”. In the upper-right hand corner there is a “Track Conversions” option, be sure this is checked and in order to get the actual code, click on “show code”. Although you access it at the campaign level, the same code applies for all campaigns so you will only need to pull it from one campaign.

3. If using MSN, make sure conversion tracking is activated for all campaigns. While Google and Yahoo allow you to activate conversion tracking at the account level, MSN requires you to activate for every single campaign. Recently added a campaign? If you didn’t mark the check box you won’t track anything. From your MSN account, click on a campaign and then click on “change settings”. Make sure the check box in the upper-right hand corner labeled Track Conversions is checked and that the code is added onto the conversion page.

4. Check your URLs and be sure tracking parameters are correct. If the issue is that leads are not going into the client’s system correctly, make sure any required tracking parameters have been added to all URLs and they are inserted correctly. One character difference can mean nothing will track.

5. Conversion tracking isn’t always immediate. Know that if you have been going through this process and you corrected the issue with one of the steps above, it might take a few hours before you start seeing the data. Don’t give up if it is not an immediate correction – fix one thing, check back in an hour or two and see if you are starting to get conversion data. If not, try something else.

6. Tracking with Google Analytics. Make sure you are consistent with your data by setting up conversion goals in Google Analytics as well. If you do this when you first get an account, this will allow you to often still see the data you need if for some reason your search engines aren’t tracking correctly. Keep in mind though, that if you change your conversion page you will also need to update your goals in analytics as well. The other piece to analytics tracking is to make sure you are tagging all of your URLs with the correct parameters to get the data you need into the system. As this is a more complicated process, I am not going to go into the details of this today, but PPC Hero does have another post on URL tagging and tracking in Google Analytics if you want to know more.

Tracking conversions correctly can be a challenging process for all involved, but what good is data if it isn’t the correct data – make sure you are getting everything you need right from the start.

Creating Account, Campaign and Ad Group Level Reports

So, first and foremost, to create a report from the Campaigns tab you need to click on the arrow in the tool bar below the navigation tabs. This will then give you your download options, and a chance to name your report. Remember that specific names will help you later, so try not to use the generic default names. You will also have the ability to choose a Segment (ie: network, certain time frame, click type, device) to help you filter the data.

It is important to note here that should you download a report upon logging in, the data included in the report will represent your default settings. This means that your date range will automatically be the last 30 days, and the campaigns or ad groups you see on the screen will be in the report. The date is certainly something to think about, because you cannot edit this field after the report is created without creating a similar report, and running it as a fresh template.

In order to filter your results, you will need to actually set and apply a filter, then download the report. The filter system is fairly straightforward, just remember that they follow AND logic, so the criteria that you set will need to apply for results to show up. For example, if you say Status = Eligible and Avg. Position is better than 3, only the items that match BOTH criteria will be included in your filter.

So once you’ve created your report, where do they go? On the left hand side of the screen you will see a list of all of you campaigns, and at the bottom there is a link called Control panel and library. Click on this link, and you will be taken to a list of all of the reports that you’ve created. Unlike the old reporting interface, you aren’t limited to seeing only the last 15 reports run (thank you Google!). You will quickly see that the more specific your naming conventions, the better, especially when you have three that say “Campaign report”, so as I said before, keep that in mind when creating a new report.

Editing Your Reports

The following fields can be edited from the control panel page:

1. Report Name – Simply type in a new name.
2. Format – You can choose from a variety of formats such as .csv, .pdf, and .xml.
3. Email – Depending on the report, different people may need to see the data, so you can choose to email just yourself, all account users, or no one at all.
4. Frequency – Each report is set by default to only run once. However, you can choose to run it daily, the first day of the month, or the same day of the week that you originally ran the report on (for example, a report I create today can be set to run every Wednesday).

Once your reports are created you can choose to run them immediately, or create a similar report. As stated earlier, should you want to set a custom time frame, you will need to create a similar report, change the date range from the original report, and run a new one.

Reports Available On The Campaigns Tab

Not all of the reports from the original reports tab are available yet on the campaigns tab. However, the following reports are already available, and just like before they will show you the following:

1. Account Reports – Summary of your entire account data to give you a high level idea of performance.
2. Ad Reports – Metrics relating to text, image, video, mobile, and local business ads.
3. Ad Group Reports – Data pertaining to your ad groups across every campaign.
4. Campaign Reports – Data pertaining to the campaigns in your account.
5. Keyword Reports – Data pertaining to the performance of all of the keywords across every campaign and ad group.
6. Placement Reports – Data pertaining to the performance of the display network (previously known as the content network).

Though the keyword, ad, and placement reports are available on the campaigns tab, they are also still available on the reports tab, but knowing that Google is moving toward reporting from the campaigns tab, I would recommend getting to know the new process to help alleviate future learning curve headaches.

The Dimensions Tab

The final part of creating new reports from the Campaigns tab is the dimensions tab. If it is not already showing in the interface when you log in, click on the down arrow directly to the right of the Ad Extensions tab, and you will see a check box next to the Dimensions Tab option. By checking that box, the Dimensions Tab will be added to your interface for future use.

So what is the dimensions tab for? It is used to help you create reports that require larger amounts of data. You may notice that if you set your time range back to far on the campaigns tab, and try to download a report, say on the day level, it will tell you that the report cannot be created. In order to resolve this issue, you need to create the report from the Dimensions tab.

From here you can create reports for various time periods such as Day of Week, Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year, and Hour of Day. You can also edit the columns that you are included so you can extend or eliminate certain metrics to make the report as customized as you want.

All in all, the new reporting system should be helpful, and I hope that it will eventually streamline the process for gathering data for various reports, so hang in there, and keep trying different filters and segments!

You’ve diligently worked to create a well-organized, well-rounded PPC account with lots of tightly-themed keywords in your ad groups. You’ve written compelling ads with lots of benefits and a strong call-to-action. You figure you’ve set up your PPC account successfully and it works well for a while.  But then you start seeing your traffic drop and you know that you’re facing trouble ahead.

Here are a few troubleshooting ideas you can use to identify issues in your account:

Verify Your Tracking

If you’re managing a conversion-based account and your account hasn’t converted in a while it’s worth it to double check that you or your programmer has applied the right conversion tracking code to your landing page.

• Go to your landing page and right-click to choose the “View Page Source” option
• Using the control+F function, search for the terms Google, Yahoo and MSN to locate the conversion tags for each search engine.
• Cross-check these conversion tags with what is provided in the Google, Yahoo and MSN interfaces.

Submit A Test Lead

To further ensure that your conversion tracking is working properly submit a test lead. Click on your ad and fill out the form or go through the conversion and have your client ensure that the test comes through on their end.

Review Your Negatives

Whether you’ve inherited an account or built it up yourself, there might be some keywords in your negative list that are blocking relevant site traffic. Comb through your negatives and ensure that you haven’t inadvertently included a relevant keyword or included the wrong match type for a keyword or phrase.

Look At Your Change History

I wish all the search engines had this tool; take advantage of the Adwords “Change History” tool. This is a great way to re-trace your steps to analyze what changes you made that might be impacting your account. This is especially useful when you see a dip in clicks on leads on a certain date. Make sure to look at changes you made several days before the numbers dropped as changes take effect over time. You might have accidentally paused a word that was performing well or decreased a bid instead of increasing it, you never know.

Check for Disapproved Ads or Keywords

Do a regular check of your ads and keywords to ensure that none of them have been disapproved by Google. Typically, the disapproval message has an explanation for the disapproval, so you can address the issue quickly.

Utilize the Ad Diagnosis Tool in Adwords

This tool can be found in the Opportunities tab of the Adwords interface. You can find out which ad is showing for a particular keyword. It also identifies some of the issues that could prevent your ads from being shown such as low bids and duplicate keywords.

Monitor Page Loading Issues

You may be getting clicks on your ads, but seeing no conversions due to issues with your landing page. Subscribe to a website monitoring services such as Dotcom-Monitor and you can get notifications when your landing pages are taking too long to load or even worse, when landing pages are down so you can address the problem with your IT team and pause your account while the issue is being fixed.

It can be frustrating to identify the issues in your account, but keep in mind that there are tools out there to help you and it is thoroughly satisfying when you can finally tackle the problem head-on.

What is JavaScript?
JavaScript in the simplest sense is a scripting language that uses browsers to do the work for a command. It can be used to dynamically generate many types of elements on a page, but today I’d like to focus on one particular example.

We have a client who receives their leads via phone. For all online marketing campaigns, they direct visitors to a single landing page that uses JavaScript to automatically show a designated phone number to anyone visiting from each of their PPC, SEO, and email marketing campaigns.

How JavaScript Can Affect Your Tracking
Though few people know how to, it is possible for an end user to turn off their JavaScript, and this will certainly affect the accuracy of lead tracking for anyone using a method similar to our client’s. The primary problem, from a lead attribution standpoint, is that these users will not be shown the PPC phone number, so if they call and convert, that lead will be attributed to a general campaign instead.

To further complicate matters, once a user has their JavaScript turned off, they are untraceable in Analytics, so you will not only lose the data on who is seeing the correct information, but you won’t know that they visited your site in the first place. If you are noticing that your leads are low, you might want to check your web server logs, and compare the number of visitors to your landing page to the number that Analytics shows. This would at least give you an idea of how many people you aren’t tracking in Analytics, and since the reason is likely that their JavaScript is turned off, you would also know that they didn’t see your dynamic information. The downside of course is that you won’t know where they came from, nor how many of them converted, so you would have to make a business rule about how many of the leads were attributed to each of your advertising efforts from the bucket of “untracked” visitors, which compromises accuracy.

If you find that you are having tracking issues due to a lack of JavaScript support, there are different solutions available, depending on your time and budget. Making individual landing pages for different online marketing campaign types would help, because you eliminate the need for dynamic content. If using JavaScript is the most efficient solution for you or your client, make sure that both parties are aware of the potential lead discrepancy caused by JavaScript-disabled users. You should also ensure that the default landing page is unique from all other pages so you will still be able to create lead attribution estimates as described above.

No matter what type of campaign you run, it’s important to understand who is seeing your ads, and reacting to them. Using your PPC data in conjunction with your web server and Analytics data will help you gain a better understanding of the full user experience, and help you effectively track customers while fulfilling their needs.

This post has been edited from it’s original version based on continued research.

The Google search query performance report shows you actual search terms typed in by users from your phrase and broad match keywords. This was a great new report we all grew to love. However, on the flip side there was much frustration due to a large grouping of impressions, clicks and spend would be grouped into a “other unique queries category.  “Other unique queries” simply meant that these keywords had too low of search volume and only triggered your ad one or two times. Therefore, Google didn’t feel they needed to show the actual search query. But like I said, most people noticed that a large number of impressions, clicks and spend were being attributed to this “other unique queries” label which made the report difficult to translate.

The purpose of the Google search query performance report is to find either new keywords to add to your account that may be getting many impressions and clicks or to find negative keywords to add to your account that may be spending too much and not converting – or they simply could be unqualified keywords.

At any rate, the good news is that Google will show all the queries that actually resulted in a click, and will no longer group all queries in that infamous ‘other unique queries’ label. They do mention that to continue to respect user’s privacy, anyone who has their referrer url blocked will continue to be blocked.

A good tip from Google about this new report update: although you will have information for queries that result in a low number of clicks, you should still focus your efforts on keywords that are yielding a larger number of impressions and clicks as these keywords will have the biggest effect on your account.

I’ll give credit to Google, it’s really nice that they listened to our complaints and took steps to fix the problem!