Winning Online

Long Story Short: Source must be lowercase “yahoo” and medium lowercase “cpc”
By Matthew McQueeny

There are many articles out there on this topic.  And I found that while they get offer great instruction on integrating Yahoo Paid Search into the Google Analytics reporting dashboard, I also found that as the data accumulated nothing I did worked.  Following articles such as this or this one (which includes info for tracking Bing), I was able to ascertain how you get this kind of thing setup.

Google allows you to automatically link one AdWords account to one Google Analytics account.  However, as with any multi-platform paid search advertising campaign - a must today - anything beyond this single Adwords - Analytics tie in does not get correctly categorized within your analytics dashboard.While the automatic Google option allows you to see paid vs. nonpaid keyword performance, or cost per click vs. organic, you cannot see this information for another Google AdWords account or for a Yahoo (or Bing) paid search account.When you, for instance, set up a paid search campaign on Yahoo, all statistics in regards to keywords and paid or organic source attribution does not get categorized.

So, anything coming in from Yahoo - and the same can be said in the case of Bing - is attributed simply as organic traffic.  To get this quality information and have Google Analytics index it correctly, you need to manually append your URL with parameters that speaks analytics’ language and gives you the opportunity to fill in the descriptive blanks.  All of the instructive information out there tells you to go to Google’s URL Builder, which gives you a form where you fill in this descriptive information and the tool renders the appended URL for you.

However, like any open-source technology, directions tend to leave out gaping holes of information that tend to be integral to getting the thing to work.  Documentation can be sparse, with issues simply being echoed throughout the internet and answers few and far between.  Here are the basics to rendering your correctly appended URL, which will allow Yahoo Paid Search information to display in Google Analytics.

1.  go to Google URL Builder 
2. Input the URL of the ad’s destination
3. for “campaign source” input yahoo
4. for “campaign medium” input cpc
5. for “campaign term” input {OVKEY}.  This is Yahoo’s automatic keyword generator tool.  Whatever the word is that led to the click-through will be indexed automatically.
6. for “campaign content” input {OVADID}, this is similar to #5 but for the campaign content.
7. for “campaign name” input something that describes the campaign.  Note: if there are spaces put an underscore for the space (so “yahoo paid search” would be “yahoo_paid_search”)

When you generate your URL this is what appears (I use our companies Web site URL as the example):

http://www.wsits.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=%7BOVKEY%7D&utm_content=%7BOVADID%7D&utm_campaign=yahoo%2Bpaid%20search

This URL is not exactly right yet.  You will need to manually alter this a bit.  You will see the the {OVKEY} was turned into %7BOVKEY%7D, {OVAID} was turned into %7BOVADID%7D, and without putting the underscores in yahoo paid search that this happened: yahoo%2Bpaid%20search.

So you will need to manually fix it to the following:http://www.wsits.com/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={OVKEY}&utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign=yahoo_paid_search

Here is the key information from all this, however.  For source, you must put only “yahoo” in all lower case and for medium you must only put “cpc” and in lower case as well. The reason I note this is because Google URL builder will allow you to put whatever case you want and will allow you to really put in anything into those two cells.  You explicitly must put just “yahoo” and just “cpc.”  It is like a magic key that opens the door to correct indexing.  I grant you this from weeks of beating my head against a computer desk.

I hope you will come to our company to do this work anyway, but I can’t have another online marketer go through this :).

You will then take your appended URL and put it into the destination URL field of your Yahoo paid search ad.  The final step to make this all work on the Yahoo administrator side is to go to “administration” and “tracking URLs” and set them to “Tracking URLs on.”