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}.