Comments on: Let’s Take another Look at URL Tagging and Tracking PPC Campaigns via Google Analytics

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:39:07 +0000

Hi John,

Thanks for the two great articles (this one and the Yahoo URL tagging one).

I’ve got a question for you…

In Australia, Yahoo control both Yahoo and Bing search marketing (ie. We don’t use Microsoft adcenter to advertise on Bing – we use Yahoo).

So in your example, if I hardcode the source to be Yahoo, clicks that come from both Yahoo and Bing would both appear in Google Analytics to be coming from Yahoo.

Is there a way I can also include the source search engine as a tag variable?

Thanks in advance!

Adam

By: San

San — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:42:46 +0000

You mentioned to add campaign name instead of campaign id in the tags, but there is no Yahoo tag for the campaign or ad group name. Is there a tag for MSN or would I have to manual insert that was as well?

Thanks,
San

By: LK123

LK123 — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:54:13 +0000

Actually MSN does now have a search query report available.

By: Jeff Judge

Jeff Judge — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:34:01 +0000

@Kevin I’m sure this is no longer useful to you given the timespan, but the problem is that there is an extra space in the example URL string:

/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={OVKEY}&utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}

In the previous post related to this, there was an extra space after cpc, which was causing Yahoo to complain about the destination URL when specifying it in the ad.

Also take note of what’s been said in the post about changing the utm_content and utm_campaign parameters to use meaningful names vs Yahoo’s numeric IDs.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:38:42 +0000

@Ahsan

There is no Yahoo tag for the campaign or ad group name. You would have to manually insert the campaign and ad group name into the string yourself. Easiest way is in Excel.

Alan

By: Ahsan

Ahsan — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:01:44 +0000

You mentioned to add campaign name instead of campaign id in the tags. I looked around for it but could not find it. Do you know of tags that I can use for Campaign and Adgroup name in Yahoo & MSN?

Thanks

By: Instrumart

Instrumart — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:37:54 +0000

Hello! You are telling me to NOT use &utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}, correct? Does this mean that I should go back to individually adding the Ad Group name and Campaign Name into the Google URL Builder tool?

I’m not really sure what the benefit of this new tracking convention is because I was already seeing keyword data from Yahoo in Analytics… Could someone please clarify for this for me?

Thanks, in advance, for your help!

By: 5 Tips that Can Make Your Life Easier When Using Yahoo Search Marketing - 4th Edition | marketFly

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:31:49 +0000

[...] to make sure that Analytics is separating Paid and Organic Yahoo traffic, you should utilize Google’s URL builder in order to tag your traffic [...]

By: Setting up Ad Groups in Yahoo is different than Google

Setting up Ad Groups in Yahoo is different than Google — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:19:18 +0000

[...] in yahoo so you can split your PPC data from your SEO data. The guys over at PPC Hero have a great write up on [...]

By: Michael W.

Michael W. — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:23:02 +0000

Just wanted to revisit this and get some feedback on what you guys have seen.

As of around late March, I’ve notice some of my clients who used auto-tagging in AdWords have just plain dropped off the map in GA – nothing got tracked.

And after switching back to manually tagged URLs and employing utm_term={keyword}, all I get in my keyword report for google cpc is x amount of clicks on “{keyword}”.

Any thoughts?