Last week I learned a very valuable lesson for anyone who thinks they can learn the in's and out's of Google AdWords and apply that knowledge to other Paid Search campaigns. At Sierra Trading Post we use a third party tracking and bid management system from Channel Advisor. With that redirect tracking system and setting internal tracking tags as well as Google Analytics tracking parameters you really need to know what you are doing. Needless to say that day I assumed I did, but I didn't.
Google AdWords and as far as I know Yahoo Sponsored Search there is a hierarchy of destination URL's. Shown to the Right. This shows that it will use the most specific destination URL possible (usually keyword level destination URL) and if that is not available then use the next most specific and so on. This way you can put all the tracking and redirect parameters at the keyword level and have very granular data to observe later, and ad level destination URL's are just a backup. With time constraints always lurking I usually leave those without proper tracking. This is a bad practice and you should always place tracking on all destination URL's that way it is easier to find and solve problems if they do arise.
Well getting to the point Microsoft AdCenter does not function this way. It uses the ad level destination URL unless other wise specified in the ad by using {param1}. {param1} in layman's terms means use the destination URL at the keyword level. Well therein lies the problem for me. I made ad copy changes to Microsoft AdCenter ads to reflect our new branding just like I would have done in Google or Yahoo interfaces and didn't append tracking to the ad level destination URl. Without any tracking all the revenue that was generated by those ads went directly to SEO revenue and Paid Search ROAS went down the tubes. Trust me on this one it is a hard thing to explain when the higher-ups ask "So why is the Paid Search revenue down this month?" Your only response is "Well, because I'm an idiot."
More on the differences of the major search engines and a comparison shopping engine relationship chart to come in the next couple of weeks.
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