Search engine marketing can be an effective tool in your digital marketing tool box, so long as you can completely understand how your spend is affecting your business goals. If you can’t, you may be throwing hundreds of dollars a day away on visitors who aren’t converting, and as a result, drastically lowering your ROI.
If you’re using Google Analytics, your paid search efforts will not automatically show up correctly in your traffic stats. Google Adwords is the easiest to fix by simply clicking a check box in your AdWords account settings to link to your Google Analytics account. Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter are a bit more complicated. Both offer placement in search results and on their respective content networks. In Google Analytics, search results placements will be recorded incorrectly as organic traffic. This is a lose-lose – you gain no insight into the actions of pay-per-click visits and muddle your understanding of your organic search performance. Similarly, content network placements will show up incorrectly as referring sites. Not quite as detrimental, but equally useless in determining cost effectiveness. The good news is, with a little bit of work, these problems can be overcome.
Step by step guide and a before and after example after the jump…
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