campaign tracking and adwords integration

Campaign Tracking and AdWords Integration

Agenda
Campaign tracking and AdWords integration
Analyze all Marketing Campaigns
How to Track your Campaigns
Integration with AdWords
Linking AdWords to Analytics
Autotagging Links
Why Autotagging?

Analyze all Marketing Campaigns
Google Analytics allows you to track and analyze all of your marketing campaigns such as:
Paid search campaigns
Banner ads
Emails
Other programs

How to track your Campaigns
Google Analytics allows to track your marketing campaign URLs in two ways:
Autotagging in AdWords
Manually Tagging Links
Autotagging your links in AdWords:
For AdWords campaigns, enable keyword autotagging which allows Google Analytics to automatically populate reports with click, cost, and other data for every keyword you buy.
In order to enable autotagging, youll need to link your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts

How to track your Campaigns
Manually tagging all other links
The second way to track campaigns is to manually tag links. So, for example, you could tag the links in an email message with campaign-identifying information.
You may also choose to manually tag AdWords links if you do not wish to enable autotagging.
The tags are campaign variables that you append to the end of your URLs.

By linking Google Analytics to your AdWords account, you can get advanced reporting that measures performance and ROI for your AdWords campaigns.
Within AdWords, click the Analytics tab to link your accounts.
The AdWords login that youre using will need administrator privileges in Analytics in order to link the accounts.
If you dont already have an Analytics account, you can click the Analytics tab and create one.

When you link your accounts, you'll have the option of enabling "Destination URL Autotagging. This option allows you to differentiate your paid ads from organic search listings and referrals.
You can choose to tag your AdWords keywords manually if you decide not to take advantage of this feature.
Your cost data -- the information about clicks and keyword spending -- will be applied once you link your accounts. If you don't want cost data imported into a particular profile, you can edit the profile settings and de-select the cost data option -- after you've completed the linking process.

It is possible to link one Analytics account to one AdWords account only.
For administration purposes, you will want to create a new Analytics account for each associated AdWords account.
Note that once you have linked an Analytics and AdWords account the time zone in Google Analytics will automatically take that of the AdWords Account (if they are different).

Autotagging
Why Autotagging
Autotagging allows Analytics to distinguish between organic traffic and advertising.
If Autotagging is not enabled, unpaid and paid clicks will look like they came from same source: Google/organic
By default, Analytics considers them both to be from Google organic search results.
So, enabling autotagging allows you to see which referrals to your site came from your paid Google campaigns and which ones came from Google organic search results.

Autotagging
How Does Autotagging Work:
Autotagging automatically adds a unique id to your destination URLs when a visitor clicks on your ad
Autotagging works by adding a unique id, or g-c-l-i-d, to the end of your destination URLs.
3rd party redirects and encoded URLs can prevent autotagging from working properly.
Test these cases by adding a unique parameter to the end of your URL --- for example you could add ?test=test.
Heres an example of a gclid appended to the end of a URL. www.mysite.com/?gclid=123xyz

Autotagging
How to enable auto tagging:Google
Go to the My Account >> Account Preferences tab within your AdWords interface
Choose Tracking option. Make sure that this reads yes. If it says no, click the edit link, check the box for Destination URL Autotagging, and click Save Changes.
View AdWords Data in Your Reports:
By Applying cost data to your Analytics account allows you to view your
AdWords click, cost, and impression data in your Google Analytics reports.

Autotagging
Importing Cost data From Adwords:
All AdWords cost data from an account will be imported into any profile in which the apply Cost Data checkbox is selected.
Make sure both AdWords and Analytics accounts are set to the same currency so that ROI data is accurately calculated.
If you don't want cost data imported into a particular profile, you can edit the profile settings.
Google Analytics is only able to import cost data from AdWords, and not from other ad networks.

Data Discrepancies
There are several reasons for these differences.
AdWords tracks clicks, while Analytics tracks visits.
Some visitors who click on your AdWords ads may have JavaScript, cookies, or images turned off. Analytics won't track. AdWords will track as click.
Invalid Clicks.
AdWords data is uploaded once a day to Analytics so the results for each may be temporarily out of sync.
Missing Google analytics code.
If autotagging disabled, make sure that you manually tag your Destination URLs with campaign tracking variables.
Campaign data can be lost if your site uses redirects. As a result, Analytics wont show the visits as coming from AdWords, but your AdWords report will still report the clicks.

Manual Campaign URL Tagging:
GA automatically tracks referrals and search queries
To differentiate b/w natural and paid results, we have to add tags to the destination URLs
Keep in mind that even if you add your own tags, you wont see any Ad Group information from AdWords.

Manual URL Tagging
You should always use the following variables:
Campaign Source - Identify an advertiser
utm_source .- Identify an advertiser
utm_medium - Advertising medium
utm_campaign - campaign name
Optional variables:
utm_content - used to track different versions of an ad
utm_term - paid search keyword
Example:
http://www.mysite.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=email

URL Builder
URL Builder:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578
To easily create your campaign URLs
If you have a large number of URLs to tag, you can use spreadsheets to automate the process.
Best Practices:
If youve enabled autotagging, dont manually tag your AdWords destination URLs.
Create your links using URL builder
Use consistent names and spellings for all campaign values
Use only the campaign variables you need