Who said long posts are bad? I think I did...ops! Well.. some long posts deserve to be read all the way though - Gary Angel's post on Getting Setup to Measure Search Engine Marketing has information that's similar to what I've come across but goes beyond what I've personally done with paid campaigns.
The main point - Web Analytics is going to report confusing information about your search traffic, if you run paid and organic at the same time, unless you can tag your paid campaign URLs with a parameter your analytics understands - so you can tell the difference between the paid and organic traffic. I often did that with KeywordMax, which I used on several clients sites in the past.
But it gets harder than this - you also need to assign keywords to Ad Groups in a way that reflects meaning and structure to the campaign, plus... you need to pass the Ad Group in the URL to your Analytics ... to get the most out of the information ...and that's tough to set up if you don't know what your doing.
Not only that - but the "Long Tail" information that comes about by Broad Matching.... will be difficult to match against a specific campaign unless you planned for it - since what you see in the keyword referral logs is the query someone actually typed in to the Search Engine ...and not the Broad Matched Query that is running in your campaign(s).
So, to summarize - here's what Gary Angel says at the end of his post (and mine):
"..
- Step #1: Insure that every target URL in your PPC Program contains a campaign identifier.
- Step #2: Make sure that the campaign identifiers are at the Ad Group Level (not higher) and that the Ad Groups are structured around meaningful concepts.
- Step #3: If your PPC program is using Broad Match, make sure that the Purchased Keyword is passed in the Target URL.
- Step #4: If your PPC program is using Content Networks, make sure they are isolated in their own Ad Groups and that you are extracting the true referrer from the URL.
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