Vipul’s blog

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool to analyze metrics of a website. It’s easy to track your Google AdWords campaign using Google Analytics but what if you want to track yahoo campaigns.

The obvious and a common question which any internet marketing professional will have is: How do I track the data for my Yahoo! Search Marketing PPC campaigns in Google Analytics?

Herewith, I am explaining this process of tracking yahoo PPC campaign data in Google Analytics in a very simple and comprehensive way.

Google Analytics allows you to capture lot of parameters/information as mentioned below to provide a detailed analysis:

Landing Page: This is the base destination URL for your campaign.
Campaign Source: Source of the above campaign. This will be ‘yahoo’ is this case.
Campaign Medium: Another parameter to track your campaign separately and very important if you are running the same campaign using various channels of internet marketing e.g. Email, Banner, CPC etc.
Campaign Term: Keyword for the campaign. Use this parameter to add keyword level detail for data capturing.
Campaign Content: To track ad versions separately. A very important parameter for ad copy testing i.e. you can define multiple copies for the same group of keywords and then analyze and see which one work better for your keywords.
Campaign Name: If you have multiple campaigns (I am sure you would have!) you can track each one of them individually using this parameter.

The first step is to zero in on the detailed information (parameters mentioned above) you want to capture in Google Analytics. Open the Google Analytics URL Builder. This tool will let you input your landing page and variables mentioned above. I would suggest you to execute this step carefully. After you manually input your data, the URL builder will provide you with a full tracking URL that you can copy/paste into your Yahoo! ads. Here’s a quick example:

Landing page: www.SomeLandingPage.com/page1
Campaign Source: yahoo
Campaign Medium: cpc
Campaign Term: study in uk
Campaign Content: study in uk ad 1.
Campaign Name: StudyInUK
Custom Tracking URL: http://www.SomeLandingPage.com/page1? utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=study%2Bin%2Buk& utm_content=study%2Bin%2Buk%2Bad%2B1&utm_campaign=StudyInUK

This is a very simple example for a single keyword and a single ad copy/text. What if you have to perform these steps for each of your keyword-ad text combination! Don’t get scared as there is a way out to simplify this task. All you need to do is modify the Campaign Term, Campaign Content and Campaign Name variables. You need to insert Yahoo’s identifiers into each of these variables to pull the auto-tagged information into Analytics.

Following are most common variables:

{OVKEY}: Paid Keyword i.e. Term
{OVRAW}: Actual Search Query entered by user
{OVADID}: Ad text ID number
{OVCAMPGID}: Campaign ID numer. Here’s another quick example:

Now, your old tracking URL will look like www.SomeLandingPage.com/page1? utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={OVKEY}& utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}

You can use this customized tracking URL for the entire campaign and pull detailed information into Analytics.

Special Note: I should reiterate that you need to turn ON auto-tagging in your yahoo account to produce real data! Otherwise, all of your Yahoo PPC visitors will register keywords as {OVKEY}.

Did anyne know that we are unable to access billions of pages of information through normal web searches? Now, in a constant bid to improve coverage of the web, Google has started experimenting with a new technology recently to dig deeper into this so-called Invisible Web.

Google is doing something different as always. It has started exploring HTML forms from high quality site and use it to crawl the URLs that correspond to the query. Sounds interesting!

This move is significant as this comprises a huge part of the web that has never been explored by search engines so far (assuming all the search engines follow this). Could this move mean a lot more information being added to the already crowded web? Now, probably users need to do some more exercise to find the desired results or user might see lots of good and quality results. Who knows!

According to offical Google webmaster blog this move doesn’t impact PageRank for other pages of the same site rather it shall only incrase the exposure of a site to Google. This change also does not affect the crawling, ranking, or selection of other web pages in any significant way.

Google has provided the advertisers and web site owners a very sound web analytics tool in the form of Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides with a great insight into your campaigns and also provides all the supporting data for fine-tuning and perfecting these campaigns.

So, make sure you don’t forget to track this data. There are lot of metrics provided by Google Analytics. And below are few important ones which should of interest for any one:

• Bounce Rate
• Avg. Time on Site
• Page Views
• Goal and
• Funnel Visualization

For advertisers who are using Analytics in tandem with their AdWords Account, the process for tracking data is very simple. Google has an auto-tagging feature which will automatically add all the Adwords data into Google Analytics. But make sure you have enabled auto-tagging.

Auto-tagging can be enabled from Account tab. Auto-tagging makes sure Analytics has all the Adword data i.e. Camapign, AdGroup, Ad, and even Keyword level data.

Do share your experience of Google Adwords and Google Analytics integration.

Bounce Rate is a very important analytics metrics (often confused with Exit Rate!) and it is used in web traffic analysis.

A bounce happens when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without navigating to any other page on that site before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur.

Bounce Rate is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software. A commonly used session timeout value is 30 seconds. In this case, if a visitor views a page and leaves his browser idle for 31 seconds, they will register as a bounce. If the visitor continues to navigate after this delay, a new session will occur and the last page they view before exiting or timing out again will result in another bounce.

The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page. In contrast, the Bounce Rate for a website is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session divided by the total number of website visits.

Bounce rates can be used to help determine the effectiveness or performance of an entry page. An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the website.

A visitor can bounce by:

• Closing an open window or tab
• Typing a new URL
• Clicking the “Back” button to leave the website
• Session timeout
• Clicking on external link

There is always a misconception that higher bounce rate means bad site or poor site content where as It is always specific to the usability of a site e.g. a user on Google’s site would most likely click on external link so the bounce rate of Google’s site is supposed to be very high. Now, do you still think high bounce rate is bad for any site?

Do share your thoughts on this.