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Thursday, 27 September 2007 |
When a visitor clicks on a Search listing (paid or organic), the visitor arrives at the site with a fully-qualified referring site. That referring URL will tell your web measurement solution what site sourced the traffic. It will also contain the search term used by the visitor.
Most web analytic tools will be able to parse this information right out of the box. They will know that Google is a Search Engine and that Semphonic is not. So they can separate out Search-based traffic. In addition, they’ll understand what query parameters each Search Engine uses (like q=) to designate the query.
Therefore, of doing Search Measurement is insuring that the target URLs in your CPC campaign (these will be set by the CPC Buyer – often an Agency) contain a unique identifier that will allow your web analytics package to recognize Paid Ads, and then making sure that the WA package is configured to recognize these. Unfortunately, many programs aren’t setup to pass the Ad Group through the URL to the web measurement solution. They should be. And if you are starting to measure PPC programs, this should be one of your first priorities.
So next step is passing the Ad Group code in the Target URL and using this code to generate Search Campaigns. This makes it possible to generate Campaigns and Segments in your web analytics tool based on visitors reaching the site via a whole group of Search Terms around a single concept.
For some campaigns, even passing the Ad Group isn’t enough. PPC buyers typically buy at the Search Term level. The Search Term is a single word or phrase. However, the Search Term can be set to exact match. With exact match, the search user must type that specific Search Term or the advertisement won’t be served. With broad match, any search the user types that includes the purchased words will generally qualify for the advertisement. So if you buy "analytics" on broad match, your advertisement will be served in response to the user entering either "web analytics" or "stock-market analytics."
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