If you run PPC campaigns on Yahoo and Bing then it is essential you change your PPC campaign destination URLs in Yahoo and Bing to properly track visitors from paid search engines and non-paid organic visitors from your SEO campaign.
Fortunately, Google Analytics already tracks visitors from Google correctly, so one-third of your job is already done for you.
It’s a bit roundabout, but this is the way to track CPC traffic from non-Google sources (e.g. Yahoo and Bing).
In 2010 Yahoo integrated their campaign management tool into Bing’s Adcenter which really speeds up the process of managing your campaigns across these sites. Using the method detailed below you’ll be able to see all of this data within Google Analytics, making it the one stop shop for all your analytics needs.
Bing and Yahoo PPC Campaign Ad Tracking In Google Analytics
1. Create a custom tracking URL using Google’s URL Builder
Follow the instructions on screen and you should produce something like this URL string or similar:
http://www.yourdomain.com/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=keyword&utm_campaign=Bing+CPC+Campaign
The "Bing+CPC+Campaign" can be anything you like which described this CPC campaign; it can be the name of the campaign e.g. spring flowers, and is just for your own reference.
2. Replace the parameter “keyword" with a placeholder which Bing will populate when they generate an ad to display. In Step 2 of Google’s instructions, in the box labelled “Campaign Term” enter {QueryString}. The {QueryString} should result in Bing presenting the words that were searched for that resulted in your ad being shown. This should produce a revised URL something like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={QueryString}&utm_campaign=Bing+CPC+Campaign
Or for a deep URL, something like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpagename?utm_source=Bing&utm_medium=CPC&utm_term={QueryString}&utm_campaign=Campaign1
You can use the term {KeyWord} rather than {QueryString} if you want Bing to tell you which of the keywords you’ve bid on resulted in your ad being shown.
3. In the Bing Adcenter campaign manager, enter this URL as the tracking URL for the campaign.
Clearly you do not want to add this URL for every keyword – so the best way to do this to change the “Destination URL” at the Ad Group Level.
Select “Ad Group”, then go to the “Ads Tab”. Now click on “Ad Title” from your list of adverts. You then get a screen which lists; “Ad Title”, “Ad Text”, “Display URL” and “Destination URL” – paste the long URL into the “Destination URL” box and click save.
Now repeat this for every Ad Group. If someone knows an even quicker way of doing this please feel free to post it here.
4. As things stand you will see the combined data for Bing and Yahoo and there is no quick way to change this. If you do want to see these as separate metrics you should first set up a new profile in GA, this is because it will change the way the data is presented and you probably want a clear, unfiltered view of all your data first and foremost!
You can then set up a new filter by visiting the ‘Admin’ section of GA. You’ll then be presented with the following screen which you should fill in as shown below (click on the image to view it full size).
The expression that you need to insert in the Field B -> Extract B case is: https?://([^/]+)
This should result in the referring domain appearing after the campaign source, making it easy to differentiate between traffic from Bing and Yahoo by analysing your traffic by source.
Wait for a day or so; and then check your Google Analytics reports to see whether you are now seeing paid search engine traffic from Bing and Yahoo.
You should be able to clearly distinguish and drill down into paid vs no-paid traffic from all search engines and have a list of sources something like this:
yahoo / cpc
yahoo / organic
Bing / CPC
Bing / organic
google / cpc
google / organic
Search engines change the ways they handle reporting and tracking from time to time; please do add a post if this process has changed or no longer works for you.
