Tracking EXACT PPC Keywords with Google Analytics

Posted on February 15, 2008 
Filed Under Analytics, Google AdWords, PPC News, PPC Optimization

First, my apologies for not posting. There was a death in my family and the majority of my time was spent with loved ones as well as trying to stay on top of client work. January and February have been particularly busy with new contracts and clients over at my Toronto internet marketing firm, Spark Internet Marketing.

For those using Google Analytics and wanting to get an edge on your PPC competition, this filter and script is a must. This filter and java script file allows you to pull in the EXACT keyword string used by people coming to your website through PPC ads. As you might now, you are able to see this data from Organic searches but PPC traffic was another story. If you were advertising using broad match for the term Barbados resort but a user typed in beach resort in Barbados you ad would show. In Google Analytics, you would see a visitor attributed to the term Barbados resort in your PPC traffic stats. This filter pulls that data in and displays it in the user defined field.

I was using an old filter posted by a great PPC resource, and newly named Semvironment, but unfortunately it seemed to stop reporting data on January 15th. I then came across a similar tool over at ROI Revolution. The only drawback was it didn’t work with the new version of Google Analytics. Thanks to Michael and his team, they just posted a new version of their filter and script that works with Google’s new code.

In the coming days, I will post how I use this filter to help optimize my accounts.

Comments

5 Responses to “Tracking EXACT PPC Keywords with Google Analytics”

  1. jameszol on February 15th, 2008 9:09 am

    I’m very sorry to hear about the passing of a family member. I hope all will be well for them and for your family in the upcoming months and years.

    Thanks for the hat tip and the update!

  2. Adam Green on February 15th, 2008 12:51 pm

    Jameszol, thanks for the kind words. The tip of the hat is well deserved. Looking forward to your next NUDE post… err… that didn’t come our right!

  3. jameszol on February 15th, 2008 1:57 pm

    hahaha…perhaps I should rename that series. ;)

  4. Daniel on March 2nd, 2008 6:21 pm

    I couldn’t understand some parts of this article xact PPC keywords with Google Analytics | PPC Whiz, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

  5. SFGreg on July 3rd, 2008 2:56 pm

    Daniel,

    This article is based on the difference between the AdWords “keywords” that you decide to bid on, and the search “queries” that people type into search engines. With AdWords and Google Analytics, you can see the keywords, but not the queries.

    The cool script he describes lets you see the queries - it puts the queries in Google Analytics.

    By looking every day at the queries from yesterday, you are bound to get some great ideas for negative keywords. You see queries written by people who obviously have no interest in your site, yet your ad was triggered and they clicked. So you figure out negative keywords that will prevent your ads from appearing for these queries. If you do this every day, first of all, it’s fun, and second, soon you’ll trim you AdWords cost by preventing unwanted clicks on your ads.

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