Comments on: The utm_term Parameter: Screwing Up Yahoo Paid Search & Google Analytics

By: DigitalAlex

DigitalAlex — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:00:15 +0000

Hey Elizabeth & John,

Thanks for pitching into the solution. I never use the URL builder for large scale tagging. You can build these out more efficiently using the concatenate function in excel to assemble this stuff.

Enjoy!
-Alex

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:05:44 +0000

Thanks. Turns out the issue was that if you use the Google URL Builder it replaces the {brackets} with } and %&B which is what GA wasn’t interpreting correctly. A little spring cleaning never hurt though!

By: John

John — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:39:21 +0000

Elizabeth,

If I were you I would do a manual check of all of my destination URLs. You can download your Yahoo! Search Marketing account and manually review each URL. It’s possible you’ve got a few URLs that are incorrectly formatted and are throwing the {ovkey} into your results!

Hope that helps.

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 21:16:04 +0000

I’ve gone through and tagged my Yahoo ads accordingly and already I am seeing a significant decrease in those (not set) results. I am however, seeing a big increase of {ovkey} as a result. Have you found a similar issue and if so, what is causing that?

By: DigitalAlex

DigitalAlex — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:13:36 +0000

Thanks for the follow-up, John. Better late than never :-)

By: John

John — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:21:12 +0000

This comment is about 4 months too late, but here goes none the less!

In regards to BJ’s question about YSM’s auto-tagging feature, in order for the utm_term={OVKey} function to work - auto-tagging must be turned on.

Chances are you’ve already figured that out and moved on, but I thought I’d share anyways.

By: DigitalAlex

DigitalAlex — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 04:32:48 +0000

Hey BJ,

I haven’t played with the tracking URL feature in Yahoo PPC, so I can’t be much help for you there.

What I can tell you is that your destination URLs need to include all of the parameters for Google Analytics. If you setup utm_source as YSM, then you can create a profile just for that source and you should get site stats (never retroactively, mind you).

If you’re still stuck, drop me an email.

Justin Cutroni’s ebook has a good overview of filters.

-Alex

By: BJ Wright

BJ Wright — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:01:55 +0000

Alex,

I continued to play with these variables, and am even trying to set up a filter too only track my Yahoo PPC traffic (since it isn’t converting very well for us). I have set up an include filter for campaign term ‘ovkey’ and am recieving 0 stats.

Have you played with the ‘Tracking Url’s’ feature within Yahoo’s PPC? Do I need this turned on or off, for this to work?

Thanks,

BJ Wright

P.S. Sorry for dragging on this post!

By: DigitalAlex

DigitalAlex — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 19:55:11 +0000

Hey BJ,

Sorry for the late reply, your comment got caught in Askimet’s aggressive spam filter for some reason.

You don’t actually segment by “utm_term”. Instead, you segment for keyword. utm_term is the same as keyword for paid search campaigns.

It would definitely be beneficial to get both the word you’ve purchased and the actual search query. Doing so would help you determine how to expand or refine your keyword list. I think the destination URL you provided would override the utm_term with only one of those values, not both.

Honestly, I don’t have an answer for you on how to get both items in Google Analytics. I’ll post again if I figure it out and if you do, email me at alex @ alexlcohen . com

Thanks,
-Alex