Today I want to explain a frequent question within Google Analytics and how to track Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter pay per click campaigns.

Tracking Yahoo and Adcenter campaign is not the as easy as one may think, but the process is fairly straight froward.

You can easily use Google Analytics to track paid search for Adwords campaigns because Adwords automatically tags keywords. However, if you think Google Analytics is not tracking your Adwords data please see the my previous post “Linking Google Adwords data with Google Analytics.”

Unfortunately, Yahoo and Mircosoft do not automatically tag paid keywords. The only way to track keywords is to tag them yourself. I know it sounds like this will take up the rest of your day, but I assure you it is not as bad as it sounds.

The first step is to go to the Google URL tool builder and make a tag for your keywords. If you would like some general information on how to tag links with the URL builder visit this blog post at Anayltics Talk.

Once you understand how to tag URLs, the next step is to put in the correct variable for the term string. This helps you avoid manually changing all of your keywords destination URL’s.

• For Yahoo use: utm_term={OVKEY}
• For Adcenter use: utm_term={keyword}

These terms are extremely important as they will tell Google Analytics information about the paid keywords. More information about correctly tagging your links is available here.

The next step is to upload the data into both Yahoo! and Adcenter.

For Adcenter keywords, first download the Adcenter desktop software and then download the campaign. Next, highlight all the keywords and in the destination URL field and plug in the URL generated for the Google URL builder.  Finally, upload the changes and Google Analytics will start tracking paid search keywords from Adcenter.

For Yahoo! keywords, first download the campaign into an Excel file at the campaign summary page. Next, put in the URL that was generated into the destination URL field for all of the keywords.  Save this file. Upload the file with Yahoo’s upload feature or send the file to Yahoo! by filling out a support ticket. They will take care of the rest.

I understand that the process of correctly tagging keywords in  Yahoo and Microsoft Adcenter can be a pain. However, tracking your keywords in Google Analytics is a critical part of any paid search campaign.