Keywords in URL for tracking

Anyone tried it?

[Michael Anthony]

I've wondered if anyone that uses a lot of PPC has ever bothered to track each keyword individually to the sale to establish which kws are making the money.

I've got the ability to do this but as I run over 20,000 kws over 5 engines it is a big job, so I would be interested to know if anyone has done it and seen a definite financial return from the effort.

All my PPC campaigns are profitable anyway and my logic is that unless I get some "I did this and it saved me £x amount" replies then I won't bother.

[seth_wilde]

Every campaign I run uses this type of tracking. Although with the large accounts I'll generally try to group similar low volume keywords together. I even like to take it a step further and do things like break out the content targeted adds or tracking ROI by query string on high volume phrases (to help build a negative match lists). I'm sure with 20,000 phrases there is a great opportunity to increase ROI.

[hobbnet]

I think the closer you can track keywords the more money you can make.

I run daily/weekly/monthly reports for all my keywords and what type of cost per lead/acquisition they are generating.

Terms that are costing me more than my target I lower the bids and/or tweak the ad copy to create a more qualified click.

Terms that are well below my target I typically up the bids (if i'm not already on top) and tweak the ad copy a bit to see if I can increase the CTR (be careful with this though as you may ruin your cost per lead).

For a 20,000 keyword list I realize creating 20,000 tracking IDs is just not possible. I would imagine you have so many terms because you are doing some sort of geo targetting.

When I extensively use geo targetting for a given campaign I typically group words into "baskets". So, if I was doing 200 combinations of the keywords "*Location* Blue Widgets" (location being the term that changes, creating the 200 combinations) I assign that one basket a single referral ID.

I think this is a good way to minimize the amount of tracking IDs you need to generate which will still allow you to see how keywords as a whole convert.

Hope that helps!

[eWhisper]

I track all the high/medium volume KWs individually. For low volume KWs, I tend to group the very similiar ones together and track the groups ROI.

For that many KWs, I would definately use some sort of KW tracking.

If you can weed out/lower bids a few high volume, low ROI KWs, or groups of low volume KWs, and either cut them loose or make them preform, you can quickly save quite a bit of money or make more money by promoting the less effective ones in a different manner.