The most beautiful thing about PPC is that everything can be tracked. I mean everything. With convenient reports from the PPC search engines and programs like Google Analytics, advertisers have no excuse to be clueless about their pay-per-click performance. Analytics makes tracking your PPC super easy, but what if you don’t use Analytics? How can you track all of your PPC data in a 3rd party analytics package? If you use Google AdWords, insertion tags are your ticket to data-heaven.
When most people see “insertion” and “AdWords” in the same sentence, they automatically think of dynamic keyword insertion. This is NOT
dynamic keyword insertion. Insertion tags, or as Google calls them – ValueTrack tags, are designed to pass important information from Google to your analytics package via your destination URL only. Use insertion tags to create comprehensive tracking URLs that will pull in keywords, differentiate between Search and Content, display ad IDs and even what site your placement targeted ad appeared on. Here are the tags:
- {keyword} – This pulls in the actual keyword from your AdWords account, NOT the search query.
- {creative} – This pulls in the ad ID.
- {ifsearch:Search} – This tells you if your visitor came via Search ads.
- {ifcontent:Content} – This tells you if your visitor came via Content ads.
- {placement} – This tells you the website your placement targeted ad was shown on.
- Example URL: www.example.com?source=google&medium=cpc&keyword={keyword}&type={ifsearch:Search}{ifcontent:Content}&site={placement}
If you’re familiar with creating custom tracking URLs for Yahoo! or MSN, this is pretty much the same song and dance. The trick here is, you’ll need to configure your 3rd party analytics software to recognize these parameters for purposes of reporting. That is unless you’re comfortable with reading the referral URL of every visitor to your site!
Just to avoid any confusion, if you are using Google Analytics with your AdWords account, you are already getting most of this data. The exception would be of course differentiating Search and Content or accessing the {placement} website data. For these parameters, you can create Advanced Filters in Analytics to pull in and report on these data points!
Does anyone use these ValueTrack tags for their PPC campaigns? If so, have you had success with them?
     | do some of that social network stuff. |
This is a very helpful topic for those of us ppc managers that allowed to drop Google analytics code on to our company’s website. My company is currently using Omniture SiteCatalyst v14, without SearchCenter and the only way I can track performance is through a unique or embedded url. I’d love to hear some ideas from anybody that is already familiar with Omniture on how to best setup url tracking. I’m not Omniture expert yet, but I’m always having to find ways i which I can simulate Google Analytics within Omniture.
[...] Discover Google AdWords Insertion Tags and Learn How to Use Them Today, PPC Hero [...]
Is it possible to get the actual search query, rather than just the keyword that triggered the keyword?
I know it is possible by checking the referrer then exploding the URL – but does Google offer this as a feature?
@Jason,
I don’t have any great advice for you concerning Omniture. The only clients we deal with who have Omniture are also using SearchCenter. However, I’m sure that there are ways to create unique tracking URLs that will pass information to Omniture. Using the insertion tags listed in this blog post, combined with identifiers that Omniture recognizes (i.e. “source” or “medium”), you should be able to populate your AdWords data quite simply. And for Yahoo/MSN, you can use these instructions for getting that data in much the same way:
http://www.ppchero.com/the-secret-of-tracking-yahoo-keyword-data-in-google-analytics/
http://www.ppchero.com/learn-how-to-track-your-msn-adcenter-ppc-keyword-data-in-analytics/
@Jamie,
For the majority of search traffic, Google appends the referral URL with loads of data – including the search query. However, I don’t know of a way to easily get this data from Google. Yahoo and MSN are a cinch! (i.e. OVRAW or QueryString, respectively) Depending on your Analytics software, you could potentially configure your software to recognize that portion of the referral URL and capture the search query for reporting (Google lists this as “q=”). Another option would be to configure your website to automatically capture that data and load it into an easily readable database file. Here are a couple of resources:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/ppc/3504906.htm
http://www.zend.com//code/codex.php?ozid=872&single=1
Let me know if you have any other questions!
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Hi John.
We are currently running Google Analytics and recently we have tried out Hit Tail at the same time.
What software would you recommend that we install in order to get the search query and how do we tie it up with the broad match keywords that we used, so that we can get a proper negative list of PPC words.
Your help would be greatly appreciated
Goran
@ Goran,
To see AdWords search queries in Google Analytics, you can use these instructions:
http://www.semvironment.com/nude-adwords-keyword-data-exposed-with-google-analytics/
To see MSN or Yahoo search queries in Analytics, you need to append your PPC traffic from those engines with URL tags. Here is the instruction for that:
http://www.ppchero.com/the-secret-of-tracking-yahoo-keyword-data-in-google-analytics/
http://www.ppchero.com/learn-how-to-track-your-msn-adcenter-ppc-keyword-data-in-analytics/
You will need to configure Analytics to recognize the following parameters:
MSN – QueryString
Yahoo – OVRAW
Let me know if you have any questions!
Thank you for the speedy response, nice surprise. Have an exSEOllent day.
Cool blog. What metrics would you suggest for the advanced filters?
@ PPC Manchester,
Some of the best filters I’ve seen used have to do with either search query data (a la SEMvironment’s NUDE keyword’s filter) or grouping particular geo-location data together. If you manage a large website with many sub-directories the, the “Directory” filter can prove useful to manage data in a much more segmented fashion.
http://doteduguru.com/id629-google-analytics-filters.html
http://www.semvironment.com/nude-adwords-keyword-data-exposed-with-google-analytics/
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=73983&ctx=sibling
How are the CPC values tracked? I remember reading an article sometime back that described a way to have the CPC value dynamically inserted into the tracking URL as mentioned with some of the above tracking variables. Does anyone know what the variable is? It would be very helpful for my analytics application which is installed on my server to track how much a click cost me. Any ideas??
How can I insert an automatic tag for ADGROUP and if its in content the Website that it was placed in.