Tracking tips

I'm always surprised at how many Google AdWords advertisers don't know about the

{keyword}

macro for tracking the actual keywords that were typed in before the user clicked on your ad. It's simple to use. If your normal destination URL for your AdWords ad is:

http://www.example.com/landingpage.htm

in the AdWords UI when you set your destination URL for the ad you simply append

?kw={keyword}

onto the end, so it looks like:

http://www.example.com/landingpage.htm?kw={keyword}

Then when the ad is clicked, you can check your log file, and you'll see that the request portion of the log line for the click has the keyword you bought that matched what was typed into Google search right before the user clicked your ad:

http://www.example.com/landingpage.htm?kw=search+term+you+bought

Yahoo! Search Marketing (Y!SM, aka Overture) has a similar feature that's actually even easier to use. Go under "Account-->Account Set-up" and turn "Yahoo Easy Track" to ON. Then your logs will contain the matched and actual keywords and the match type for each click.

Update: I've corrected a mistake in the original post about what the Google {keyword} macro will insert into your request. It will give you the keyword that matched the user's search, not what the user typed in. Y!SM's Easy Track feature will actually give you both, however.

  ¶ 4/25/2005