Generally, Pay per click (PPC) account managers find it difficult to monitor performance of their content campaigns. In order to optimize their campaigns, it is important for them to understand whether the chosen keywords are the right ones, especially to measure the performance of the keywords they bid for.

The content network displays ads to users as they search for topics of interest and browse sites that relate to their keywords. The ad group’s entire keyword list helps determine where ads show on the content network. Here the rule is, the more closely related the keyword, the more likely the ads will find the right audience.

It is important to know which keywords actually worked on which site. However, Google does not provide this information in any Google AdWords report or directly through Google Analytics (GA).

When you use “Auto Tagging” to track AdWords’ data in GA, all applicable information such as campaign name, ad group name, keywords, ad content, etc. are tracked by the query parameter gclid – Google click id, which is a unique combination of characters and numbers.

Here is a sample GA analysis for content campaigns in a typical keyword report:

Getting data for high-performing keywords for content campaigns

By manually tagging and extracting data or logs to your server, you can accumulate data for high performing keywords of content campaigns. Here is how we do this:

First, tag the landing page (for example: http://www.mysite.com/users/home.aspx) with the proper utm, Network and SiteTarget parameters as follows:

http://www.mysite.com/users/home.aspx?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=contasap&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=

quick&Network={ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}&SiteTarget={placement}

Note:

• For more on utm parameters go to:

http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

• Network – is used to differentiate search and content ads

• SiteTarget – is used to obtain the site name where your ad is displayed

When a visitor clicks on your content ad, which is displayed on www.nytimes.com, the URL captures the information as follows:

Example:

http://www.mysite.com/users/home.aspx?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=sitedefeb&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=

iphone&Network=C&SiteTarget= www.nytimes.com

Next, gather the query parameter values on your back-end data.  The parameter value of the utm_term will provide you the keyword that helped you display your ad on the website.

Conclusion:

By using this method, one can understand which keyword was converted from which campaign and from which site. This will give you the insight into which keywords to retain and which ones to remove from your list of keywords for PPC, thereby maximizing ROI through content campaigns.

Contributed by Bhagawat Jadhav

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