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Phantom Yahoo Spending and Analytics: Omniture Search Center

With substantiated claims that Yahoo automatically inserts keywords, bids, and new ads into existing campaigns, analysts are having a hard time learning the true impact those changes have on their bottom line. Yesterday’s news about Yahoo automatically ‘optimizing’ advertiser campaigns comes at a pretty labor-intensive cost for users of Omniture Search Center. Thankfully there is a solution, but you may not like it.

Without going into too much detail and possibly revealing sensitive information, I’ll outline the process by which Omniture tracks search engine marketing efforts. Most advertisers feel more comfort in creating ads in Yahoo’s own web interface, rather than in Omniture, which requires a synchronization with Search Center after any changes are made to a campaign. A typical process is as follows:

1. Advertiser creates campaign, keywords, bids, and ads in Yahoo or Google Adwords.
2. Campaign is paused, and Search Center imports and synchronizes campaign information.
3. Search Center inputs tracking variables into target URL fields that it uses to track originating keyword names, ad creative, and other metrics. If nothing changes, users do not necessarily have to synchronize again (although it is a good practice to do every so often).
4. Advertisers make keyword bid changes, keyword additions, and ad creative changes in Omniture Search Center, negating the need to synchronize again. If changes are made in Yahoo’s interface, Search Center synchronization is required.

The problem is obvious. If Yahoo automatically inserts, removes, places bids for new keywords, changes ad text, or inserts new ads, Omniture Search Center (and the advertiser) is blind to that fact. This creates a serious problem in conversion tracking and campaign management. Search Center may attribute the spend of that campaign to “Yahoo” as a search engine in your data, but it certainly will not attribute conversion metrics to any specific campaign.

What’s worse, overall spend metrics may be significantly different in Omniture Search Center than it is in Yahoo’s administrative web interface. Those advertisers that are comfortable working with Omniture will often default to metrics they provide, rather than monitoring the same metrics in Yahoo’s web interface. Advertisers are in for the shock of their lives when their bill arrives at the end of the month, or when a credit card is charged for a hefty advertising cost.

The good news is, Omniture has a solution…

Prior to Search Center 3.0 and Site Catalyst 14, it was a good idea to tag your campaign names with unique letters signifying the search engine the campaign belonged to. Why? Well, if you named the campaigns the exact same thing in both Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, you were in for a treat because Search Center used to merge the campaign metrics, revenue numbers, and everything else into one pig of a campaign.

Thankfully, that is no longer an issue. However, campaign synchronizations are still a definite requirement. With Yahoo adding keywords and ads by themselves, this presents a problem for our tracking codes. Search Center doesn’t automatically synchronize with search engines, so changes made even a few months ago will go unnoticed. Don’t you love guessing conversion metrics?

Enter the SAINT tool. I hate using SAINT because it overwrites campaign information in RAW data stores, so if you mess up, you’re data is done for good. However, since Yahoo has already messed up Omniture Search Center data, you don’t have to worry too much about making matters worse.

Using SAINT is dangerously simple. You basically download a text file that has a range of information you specify, look for errant traffic not accounted for by Search Center campaigns, attribute those metrics to keywords and campaigns they belong to by populating empty eVar fields, and upload the file to SAINT. It’s best to start with a small sampling of data at first, to get smaller, more manageable file sizes from the data warehouse first, and to get comfortable with how the tool works.

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