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

We have been a part of the social media phenomenon since its advent. We’ve seen social media evolve and become an established marketing discipline.

Currently, we develop strategy and manage social media marketing (SMM) campaigns for most of our clients and our activity in this area has doubled in the last three months. The interest inSMM was coming to a head, and this burst in business has afforded us opportunities to experiment with various forms of SMM and strengthen our capabilities for the future.

At the onset of SMM we started with blog commenting, PR submissions and social bookmarking. We quickly moved on to executing micro-sites, widgets, multiple blogs, Twitter campaigns and viral techniques.  We have taken our clients to a higher level of social media. We have dedicated Twitter experts, social networking strategists, and designers who specialize in building applications for social media. We’ve grown to have a strong sense of confidence in this discipline and now feel that we can guide any client in achieving its business and marketing goals through our social media marketing practice.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a vital part of any online marketing strategy. Most of the time, our clients are initially unsure of how to approach social media marketing and whether they should get into it at all. We get a lot of questions from marketing managers about how to start off with social media, what the benefits are, and how to sell it to their bosses.

Earlier SMM was seen as an addition SEO efforts, with it being a part of traditional link building and blog commenting. Position2’s strategy and competencies grew in tandem with the evolution of social media and it became clear that SMM was more than just link building and commenting. It was about conversing, interacting and engaging with influencers and customers at various stages of their decision making and buying cycles. We also deployed a host of tools—free, paid, and custom developed in-house—to track, measure, revise and lift social media campaigns. Clients who were not convinced about the value of SMM began to realize that qualified traffic could be increased through SMM alone.

An SMM client of ours—a leading medical alert system provider—was one of the clients whose faith in SMM grew when traffic to their website increased considerably along with conversions. They said “Position2 has helped take our company to a new level. The team has demonstrated a level of expertise and that has not only increased my ROI in the online marketing space but also elevated our entire web presence.” In this case educating the client and delivering on the right expectations have been key in achieving client satisfaction.