Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

I’ve blogged before about how Google AdWords can track revenue within the AdWords interface, without relying on Google Analytics. You can do the same for Yahoo Sponsored Search.

A note about why you might not want to only use Google Analytics to report revenue: Google Analytics attributes a conversion to “last touch” while Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search attribute it to “first touch.” What that means is if someone came to your website on a Monday through a paid ad, and didn’t buy anything, then returned a week later (either through a bookmark and manually typing in your URL) and bought something, Google Analytics would count that conversion as a Direct referral (the last way they came to your site), while AdWords and Sponsored Search would attribute it to PPC (the first way they came to your site).

It’s not a big deal when the vast majority of your visitors order on their first visit, but becomes a big deal when a large percentage of them don’t. I have several clients where over 50% of their visitors don’t buy on that first visit, which makes PPC look like it doesn’t perform that well. Once you factor in those “first touch” conversions, PPC certainly is a much more important piece of the marketing puzzle.

So back to how you track revenue in Yahoo Sponsored Search… I have to give Yahoo credit – they beat Google on this by including revenue right in the normal screens you use to manage your Yahoo Sponsored Search campaigns. Google only reports revenue on their actual reports, which makes it more of a pain to manage; Not impossible, just not as easy to analyze and then make quick changes.

To track Yahoo Sponsored Search revenue, you’ll just need to add one more tiny bit of code to your conversion tracking. Replace where I have ORDER.SUBTOTAL with your dynamically generated Order Subtotal field into this line of your Yahoo Sponsored Search Analytics code (You can also do Order Total, but I recommend doing the Subtotal which excludes tax and shipping, for a more accurate picture of your revenue.):

window.ysm_customData.conversion = “transId=,currency=,amount=ORDER.SUBTOTAL“;

That’s it. Pretty simple and pretty powerful. Now you can actually see what kind of revenue your Yahoo Sponsored Search campaigns are actually generating, and then make better informed decisions about where your PPC advertising dollars should be spent.

A note on this: I attempted to do it for a client that uses a Volusion cart and processes credit cards offline (meaning they don’t actually process the credit card at the time of order, but do it manually at a later time), but this won’t work for them. I’m guessing that this will hold true for any shopping cart; if you don’t process credit cards in real-time, it won’t work. In fact, for this client, it also prevented the number of conversions from tracking.

One last note: Unfortunately, MSN AdCenter does not have the same functionality. Here’s hoping they get that solved before they take over supplying Yahoo’s paid ads.

If you need help getting Yahoo Sponsored Search Revenue Tracking implemented and/or analyzed, contact a reputable PPC management company for assistance.

Google recently made a significant change in how they treat using trademarked terms in Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) advertising ad copy. Prior to this change, unless you had direct written approval from a trademark holder, you were pretty much out of luck when it came to using a trademarked term in your PPC ad copy. Even if you were an authorized reseller of a specific brand, you still could not use the brand name in your Google AdWords ad copy unless Google had express written permission from the trademark holder on file.

That has all changed. And that is great news for many e-commerce sites that sell branded items. If you are a reseller of goods that have a trademarked brand and if your landing pages give significant focus to the trademarked term, then most Google AdWords ads within the United States will now be approved to run on Google. Also, make sure the trademarked term is used in a text format on your website, as opposed to only flash, so Google can recognize the use of the trademarked term on your page.

The approval process for ads the contain trademarked terms is a separate process at Google AdWords. The ads are first approved to run for all other Google policies, and then they are checked so the use of the trademark and the landing page are in alignment with Google’s new trademark policy guidelines. This approval process may take a bit longer than the normal time you may have seen in the past for non-trademarked ads, so you will need to give Google AdWords ads containing trademarks a bit more time to show up on Google.

Also, you might notice that these trademark ads may show a status of “approved-limited.” This means that Google recognizes that the ad contains a trademarked term and that the advertiser was not given direct permission from the owner of the trademark to actually use it in Google pay per click ad copy. This does NOT mean that the ad will only show for a limited time or in limited regions, but it does mean that Google will check this ad continually to make sure it aligns with the new trademark policy. The content of your landing page will be constantly assessed by Google to make sure the trademark is still featured prominently, so be careful of any changes you make to your landing pages, especially after your trademark ads have been approved and are receiving click traffic.

This change is a real plus for anyone doing PPC management because we all know that if someone is searching for branded items, it certainly is nice to have that trademarked brand name in your ad. If I’m looking for Lexmark ink, I’m certainly more inclined to click an ad that has the Lexmark trademarked term in the ad, than on a generic ad that does not.

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My last blog was about the different ways Google AdWords tracks pay-per-click (PPC) advertising conversions and Google Analytics tracks PPC transactions. If you have a large number of site visitors who don’t purchase on the first visit, but do on subsequent visits, Google Analytics doesn’t attribute the transaction to how they found you in the first place. A way to get around that is to track revenue in Google AdWords.

I’ll have to admit that this is something relatively new to me (and a thank you to Michael Whitaker at Monitus for telling me it was possible). A search through Google AdWords help files comes up with nothing, nor did my Google reps ever explain that it could be done – they always pointed to Analytics as the tool to track revenue. And the answer is really simple – when you add conversion tracking to your thank you page, you can alter the code slightly to capture the revenue generated by an order.

You’ll need to change the YOUR-ORDER$ to be the field name of your order subtotal which can differ by shopping cart.

One note on this: I attempted to do it for a client that uses a Volusion cart and processes credit cards offline (meaning they don’t actually process the credit card at the time of order, but do it manually at a later time), but this won’t work for them. I’m guessing that this will hold true for any shopping cart; if you don’t process credit cards in real-time, it won’t work. In fact, for my client above, it also prevented conversions from tracking.

One more thing to know about tracking Google AdWords revenue: you can’t see results within the Google AdWords interface, you have to run a report to actually get the data. You’ll need to select the field “Sales Conv. Value (many-per-click)” in order to add that data to a report, and then you’ll be able to see revenue by Account, Campaign, AdGroup and even keyword by keyword, and learn how profitable your PPC campaigns really are. If you need help getting Google AdWords Revenue Tracking implemented and/ or analyzed, contact a reputable PPC management company for assistance.

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