Search Marketing and Internet Marketing Blog Online

If any of you have utilized your Google analytics account to track PPC programs outside of Google Adwords you have no doubt run into a tracking issue or two. Here is a quick run-down of how to get your URLs tagged appropriately in order to track accurately:

Data from Google AdWords is automatically included in your Analytics reports (assuming you have AdWords and Analytics linked). For your 3^rd party PPC campaigns, the “how” is pretty simple. First, go to Google’s URL Builder tool, and enter the destination URL from your ad texts (i.e. landing page). From here you can enter the five parameters that will become your URL tag.

• utm_source: This is the name of the search engine or the source of traffic (i.e. Yahoo, MSN, email newsletter, blue banner ad).
• utm_medium: This is how you tell Analytics what type of traffic your source is (i.e. cpc, email, banner).
• utm_term: This is where you detail keywords! This can be manually entered or dynamically generated with Yahoo’s {OVKEY} or MSN’s {QueryString} parameters.
• utm_content: Consider this the ad variation or ad group. You choose how detailed you want to get. Typically, I designate this as the ad group for my PPC campaigns.
• utm_campaign: If the name isn’t obvious enough – this is where you designate the name of your campaigns!

Once the tool gives you the fully tagged URL, all you need to do is copy and paste that URL into your ad texts. Google Analytics will do the rest of the work for you and begin giving you keyword level data for all of your PPC campaigns!

Have any additional tips? Please feel free to add in the comments!