How do you track your AdWords & Bing campaigns?

[jayk]

I put a campaign together a few weeks ago that is delivering, but I have no idea what's delivering and where. I'm curious what ya'll do to track the keywords you're using to generate conversions?

I'm generating affiliate sales, so I don't have control over using a pixel to track the conversions, but I'd love to have a way to mark keywords and see them in my Analytics so I at least know who is making it from Page 1 on my site to Page 2 (indicating they've more than likely made a purchase.)

Any ideas?

 

[Ryuzaki]

You can use UTM Tagging / Parameters / Code. People call it different things, but basically it allows you to name the campaign, the source of traffic, and medium.

So it would be something like...

hxxp://buso.com?utm_campaign=lander1&utm_medium=ppc&utm_source=bing
​

And this would show up in your analytics, neatly categorized.

 

[jayk]

So for each adset, adjust the URL to add in the utm_campaign, utm_medium, and utm_source, and Analytics will show it automagically?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Google provides a tool to help you make sure you're doing it just right. You type in your names for the fields and it builds the URL for you:

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

 

[TacoCat]

So for each adset, adjust the URL to add in the utm_campaign, utm_medium, and utm_source, and Analytics will show it automagically?

Yup, later in the analytics you go under acquisition -> campaigns -> All Campaigns and there you will see all your custom made campaigns, under campaigs you will see each source that you've made for each campaign. It allows you to track how different audiences behave on your site.

I'm right now running a Facebook campaign with a lot of different audiences and with different banners.

This allows me to see how each seperate audience from each banner behaves on my site and I can really quickly see who is good for business and who is not.

For example if I see that an audience is working good from Banner V1 but the same audience works bad from banner V2 I know that there is some missmach between the offer in the banner V2 and the landing page, so you can tweak the offer.

 

[AYGJoe]

You want to be using dynamic tracking URL's.

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2549100?hl=en

You can also update conversions that way. Works quite well.

 

[Antti]

There's few ways you can track PPC campaigns.

For AdWords to Analytics it's easy, you just take your AdWords Customer ID and connect it to your Analytics account. After that, enable auto tagging on your AdWords settings. You get all data nicely on AdWords reports in Analytics automatically.

With Bing it requires bit more manual work. You should be tracking keyword level data with utm_term -parameter in addition to parameters other people have said.

For Facebook, you should separate the different ads with utm_content -parameter.

Hope this helps!