Forum Moderators: buckworks & skibum

Message Too Old, No Replies

Tracking AdSense vs. AdWords

Separate tracking URLs?

         

woop01

7:40 pm on Jun 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Hi,

I track my AdWords users by sending them to “mysite.com/?source=adwords&kw=widgets” and then setting cookies which as worked pretty well for me. I would like to know the difference in ROI for my AdWords and AdSense campaigns but would much rather do it the way I’m doing it right now than dig into the server logs.

Does anybody know of a way to setup different destination URLs for AdWords and AdSense? For example,

AdWords clicks go to “mysite.com/?source=adwords&kw=widgets”
AdSense clicks go to “mysite.com/?source=adsense&kw=widgets”

dmorison

8:16 pm on Jun 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



No way that i'm aware of at the moment.

If i'm correct; you're asking because you'd like to know whether it is worth your while participating; and that you're not just throwing money at "happy clicks" when allowing your ads to be shown on "partner" sites.

"happy click" = a click on a paid ad by someone who is bored and will click on anything.

woop01

8:22 pm on Jun 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Exactly.

Well, that and I know what kind of crap traffic I get from the partner sites of Overture.

Shak

8:30 pm on Jun 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



woop01,

you fail to mention PARTNER sites such as AOL and ASK.

would you class them in Adwords, Adsense or "Adanything"?

Shak

woop01

8:42 pm on Jun 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Right now, I just want to know the difference in ROI between AdWords and AdSense regardless of the site they come from. I can turn off AdSense if it's underperforming but I can't turn off AOL or ASK.

My ROI is very health for AdWords as it is. I just want to make sure this ten-fold increase in clicks I've gotten because of AdSense is cost effective.

killroy

9:36 pm on Jun 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



only thing I could think of is to copy your campaign, enable one for searches only, and the other for content only, then put adsense in the urls for the adsense campaign, and adword for the other.

lots of work, but might be worth it.

SN

dmorison

9:50 pm on Jun 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



only thing I could think of is to copy your campaign, enable one for searches only, and the other for content only, then put adsense in the urls for the adsense campaign, and adword for the other.

Can you do this? I thought everything was Adwords without option, and partners by choice...

woop01

10:10 pm on Jun 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I think I may have stumbled into a way to do it. I was searching my database and noticed that a few of the referals from Adwords didn't have the keyword string included (I use?source=adwords&kw=keyword).

I was quite upset with myself because I thought I had setup tracking URLs for all 200+ KWs we bid on but then realized that these are likely hits from the "googlesyndication" sites.

It's a real shabby way to do it but it's the best thing I know of right now.

killroy

9:14 am on Jun 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Well in the campaign edit screen it has to check boxes:
Searches
Content

sound to me like you can sitch of searches and have only content ads running.

SN

danny

9:25 am on Jun 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



People using AdSense get to block ads for particular sites, so surely people using AdWords should be allowed to restrict their ads to particular Content sites, or exclude them from particular sites.

As someone who's just started running AdSense, it would be nice to be able to say "if you want to advertise on this site, join Google AdWords and enable ads on thisdomain.com".

dmorison

9:29 am on Jun 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Hi,

Searches
Content

Just to clarify; these options choose between Search partner sites (such as AOL, Compuserv etc.) and Content partner sites (Blogger, How Stuff Works) and presumably AdSense.

All AdWords show on Google all the time.

woop01

1:24 am on Jun 26, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Just FYI, I got a response from Google stating that the only way to track Adsense vs. Adwords is to use your server logs. I'm not sure why they couldn't setup a separate tracking URL like they allow us to do for different keywords but they didn't say they were planning on adding that feature any time soon.

wellzy

6:19 pm on Jul 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Do you have to do AdWords to do Adsense. I'm thinking of doing AdSense, but I no longer do AdWords.
Thanks
wellzy

Jenstar

6:44 pm on Jul 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



In your referral logs, AdSense clicks show up as [pagead2.googlesyndication.com...]

AdWords clicks show up as [google.com...]

Both will then have a string of characters on the end which is the tracking code. I haven't noticed any differences to tell banner clicks vs skyscraper clicks with AdSense, but I haven't analyzed that tracking string they tack on the end.

gengar56

6:27 am on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



wellzy,

yeah, you can use adsense on your content sites without adversing with adwords at all. so, yes.