Tracking Paid versus Organic keywords in Omniture SiteCatalyst
I received an interesting plea for help recently via e-mail regarding tracking paid versus organic keywords in Omniture SiteCatalyst. Although many functions are available within vanilla installations of SiteCatalyst, and several settings can be added to implementations after the fact – the little guy is often left holding the stick. It’s easier for Omniture to say, just buy Search Center, because well, 9 times out of 10, they make money that way. For simple keyword tracking without incurring any residual fees, get ready to roll-up your sleeves.
Here is an excerpt from the e-mail I was talking about.
I’ve been searching omniture’s “knowledge center” for information / instructions / etc. to help me track paid search keywords in sitecatalyst. We’re tracking clicks/conversions on ads, but can’t seem to correlate keywords and ads in any kind of usable way. Omniture, of course, doesn’t shed any light other than to try to upsell me to SearchCenter, which is out of the question.
You have published a number of very interesting posts relevant to SiteCatalyst, and I believe there was one that alluded to tracking keywords in paid search with SiteCatalyst. I’m wondering if you might write a post sometime that outlines the steps one might take to do that?
-Jim
Dirty, just plain dirty. First off, if anyone at Omniture is reading this post, and there is probably a good chance someone is, this is part of the reason your reputation isn’t stellar. Just sayin’.
To Jim, I’m going to walk you through this, because no matter how many times I e-mail my own marketing folks, they don’t seem to get how to do this. It might be easier just to point them to this post in the future.
What you’re interested in finding is in the administrator section of your Omniture web interface. If you navigate to Admin -> Report Suites, this will bring up a list of all your “Report Suite ID’s”, with Site Title, and Base URL. Select the report suite or suites in question (you can choose multiple), and hover over Edit Settings -> General -> Paid Search Detection.
You probably don’t have any entries in the “Current Paid Search Detection Rules”. We’re going to add one. If you want to use different tracking codes for different search engines, you can choose specific engines in the drop-down list. I would recommend using one tracking code for all search engines to start. If you simply enter “kw” or “keyword” or “kid” into the field and hit Add. Once that’s done, you can start coding your search ad’s target URL with the keyword embedded, for example:
http://www.ppc-advice.com/index.php?kw=omniture
That will basically enable SiteCatalyst to recognize incoming referred clicks from any search engine as paid keywords. By default, any keywords in your “Traffic Sources” report should enable you to correlate to Campaigns and Tracking code, but not necessarily “Pages” unless you specify a “Data Correlation” ahead of time. Data correlations can be setup in the admin section as well, under Traffic -> Data Correlations.
For the most part, just getting paid and organic keywords segmented using the above configuration piece should help a lot on it’s own, but it is a bit of work going into the Adwords or Yahoo Search interface and making sure those codes are added. Luckily, both systems enable you to automatically insert keywords into target URLs with the help of dynamic keyword insertion strings. For example, in Adwords you would just input:
http://www.ppc-advice.com/index.php?kw={keyword:nil}
If you really want to get fancy, you can also use a campaign id in your target URL string, so that not only can you see the traffic referred to the site on the keyword level, but also on the tracking code level (for an entire ad group, for instance). A very nice example being:
http://www.ppc-advice.com/index.php?kw={keyword:nil}&cid=omniture
So, next time Omniture’s support team tells you that you need to upgrade, think twice. Sometimes you just need to get the right person on the phone, or drop magical words into the conversation to get a good solid response. I hope what I provided here addresses most of your question. If you need more information than what is provided within SiteCatalyst after following these instructions, and you have a big enough marketing budget to carry the additional burden, Search Center is a great product that can make your life easier.
However, the overall ROI you see in advertising spend has to make sense. In your case, it sounds like it wouldn’t at this point.
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