Adwords click tracking

[moishe]

Howdy Ya'll

I'm tinkering about with Adwords to cover a particular KW phrase that I can't seem to rank for. I have it settup in AW as "keyword1 keyword2" (its a 2 word place name), the idea being that I'll get that phrase plus any other searches like "kw1 kw2 another kw".

What I want to track is how many clicks come specifically from those ads, can I do this by adding some string to my landing URL, IE www.example.com?something and then look at my logs for that string..?

Also, is there any way to find out exactly what search terms generated the clicks?

[naplesdave]

Yes. That's the way many do it. Alternatively, you could use Google Analytics to track keywords.

[jtara]

You don't need your own website logs OR Google Analytics for this. The clicks for each keywords are listed right next to the keyword when you display the adgroup in the web UI.

Or am I not understanding what you want?

Your question is a bit confusing, as you talk about keywords and then say that you want to know "how many clicks come specifically from those ads". Which did you mean? Ads or keywords?

In any case, Google keeps track of clicks both by ad and keyword, so you still don't need anything special.

If you can restate your question more precisely, we can probably give you more help.

I can answer your last question, though. There is no way to find out EXACTLY what search terms generated clicks. You can find out which of your keywords generated a given click (there are macros you can add to the URL, or you can ad your own strings at the keyword level) but there is no way to discover the exact search term that the user entered.

i.e. your keyword is:

blue widgets

User searched for:

fuzzy blue widgets

There is no way for you to determine that they entered "fuzzy blue widgets". You can only determine that their search term matched against your keyword "blue widgets".

[moishe]

OK, so I dug around in some old posts and found this as an example:
www.example.com?source=adwords&keyphrase={Keyword}
in this example, other than my domain, which of these words do i need to fill in, IE "keyphrase" "keyword", do these get replaced or left as is in this example?

[moishe]

jtara:
the problem I am having is that I am using adwords with a 2 word keyphrase with quotes around it, as a result, my understanding is that if someone searches for that phrase exactly or that phrase plus some other words, the ad will display.
The problem is, I want to create negative keywords to exclude some search results where I already rank for 3+ KW combinations but when I look at my logs and see fuzzy blue widget, I don't know if that click came via adwords or organic search.

[jtara]

The example you gave is fine just as it is. No substitutions needed.

www.example.com?source=adwords&keyphrase={Keyword}

"source=adwords" could be anything. i.e. you could have used "from=google_search" or "mole=pinky". It's just whatever you want to use to distinguish the Adwords traffic from other traffic in your logs.

{Keyword} tells Google to substitute your keyword at that point. So, if Adwords matched "blue widgets", you'd get:

www.example.com?source=adwords&keyphrase=blue+widgets

Note that you can't tell using this whether you got an exact, phrase, or broad match.

If you need to know that, use a seperate destination URL for each keyword, then include the match type as a literal. You could include the keyword as a literal or I believe still use {Keyword}

blue widgets ** .20 ** example.com?source=adwords&match=broad&keywords={Keywords}

[blue widgets] ** .20 ** example.com?source=adwords&match=exact&keywords={Keywords}

"blue widgets" ** 20 ** http://example.com?source=adwords&match=phrase&keywords=blue+widgets

There are additional macros that let you distinguish content network from search. (But not Google Search from Search Network), will tell you wich content site it came from, and can give you Google's internal ID for the ad (the "creative ID").

What you are NOT going to be able to get is:

"curly blue widgets with polka dots" when somebody search on that and you are only matching on "blue widgets". Would be nice, as it could give you a good idea of what negative keywords to use.

[moishe]

Thanks Jtara, I'll play with it some more with the info you have given me.