Yahoo! Search Marketing

Tips and Tools

Tips for Monitoring Your Traffic
How Do I Install Conversion Tracking?
How Do I Enable Tracking URLs?
How Do I Interpret My Tracking URLs?
How Do I Add Traffic From Other Continents?

Tips for Monitoring Your Traffic

As an online advertiser, you're probably concerned about how your traffic is performing. Our sophisticated Click Protection System works 24 hours a day to identify click fraud and/or invalid clicks. But it's also a good idea to monitor your own traffic, and Yahoo!'s tools can help. Here are some best practices to consider:

Use Tracking URLs to Identify Traffic Sources
Analyze Your Traffic
Take Action Through Account Management
Submit a Click Investigation Request

Use Tracking URLs to Identify Traffic Sources
A tracking URL is a bit of extra text that appears at the end of a normal web address in your web server logs. It looks like this:

The tracking URL tells you which visitors were directed to your web page from a Yahoo! Search Marketing ad, and helps you find out where that ad was displayed. To help you identify unusual traffic patterns when you review your web server logs, we recommend that you have a tracking URL specific to your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns. Click here to learn how to enable tracking URLs.

Analyze Your Traffic Using Web Server Logs and Analytics Products
You have information on your web server logs that can help you better understand your traffic. Web server logs are files created by a web server that record clicks from your web site's visitors, including those from your Yahoo! Search Marketing ads. Although formats can differ, web server logs record the page on which your ad was clicked, and the pages users visited within your site.

Web logs help you understand where your traffic is coming from; many third-party software programs offer additional information that is useful in analyzing your traffic performance. Products like Yahoo!'s free Conversion-Only Analytics can help you learn more about what traffic is converting for you and what traffic is not. You can use this information along with your web server logs and Yahoo! Search Marketing reports to find the keywords, continents, and sites that are bringing you the most sales, and to better understand where increases in traffic are coming from. Of course, increases in either clicks or impressions may simply be a result of normal user activity, such as seasonal fluctuations in clicks or your ad's position in search results.

Take Action Using Account Management Tools

Set a Budget
Your traffic may fluctuate from day to day. But by setting a Daily Spending Limit, you help control the amount you spend. For example, if you average $250 in clicks per day and set your Daily Spending Limit at $350, you can capitalize on the extra clicks that may result from a spike, without breaking the bank.

Block Domains That Don't Meet Your Needs
Blocked Domains lets you specify sites on which you don't want your ads to appear, whether they're competitors of yours, or have products or content that you don't want associated with your brand.

You can block up to 250 domains. These can be an entire domain, a subdomain, or up to two subdirectories per domain.

Submit a Click Investigation Request
If you have questions about detecting click fraud and/or invalid clicks or regarding specific clicks for which you've been billed, please submit a Click Investigation Request or contact the Yahoo! Search Marketing support team.

How Do I Install Conversion Tracking?

Understand Your Conversions and Traffic
A conversion is a completed transaction event on your site, such as purchasing a product, registering for a trade show, or downloading a document. One key way to measure your "traffic quality" is to monitor your conversions using a product like our Conversion-Only Analytics.

Why use Conversion-Only Analytics?
Our product, Conversion-Only Analytics, is designed to show you how many conversions result from the clicks generated by your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns. This feature is available to all of our advertisers. It's a simple method to both monitor your traffic quality and optimize your budget.

Conversion-Only Analytics:

Captures conversion data at all levels in your account.
Helps track "assists," when a keyword contributes to a conversion that was credited to a different keyword or a different marketing tactic.
Lets you test and evaluate campaign performance.
Establishes baseline conversion rates for your campaigns, which will help you identify unusual traffic. It'll also help you learn which ads may be under-performing and how to better allocate your budget.
Offers data that will help to identify and analyze other metrics such as your revenue, CPA (cost-per-action), and ROAS (return-on-advertising-spend).

How to Install Conversion-Only Analytics

Follow the five steps below to activate Conversion-Only Analytics:

Log into your account.
From the Administration tab, select the Analytics link.
Click the "Enable Analytics" button.
In the Conversion Only panel, select "Constant Average Value" or "Dynamic Value:"
- Constant Average Value: A fixed revenue value to be used with each conversion. For example, if you offer leads only, and a lead is worth $15, you would insert "$15"
- Dynamic Value: Dynamically updates the revenue amount for each transaction completed on your web site. For example, if you are an online retailer and offer a variety of products, the dynamic value will capture the value of each product you sell.
Copy the tag-a small piece of HTML code-and paste it onto the confirmation page on your site.

How Do I Enable Tracking URLs?

How to Enable Tracking URLs Step-by-Step
You can better understand the sources of your traffic and whether you are receiving an unusual amount of traffic by using tracking URLs. Tracking URLs can be typed in manually when you create your ads, or our tracking URLs system can generate them for you.

Also, there are sometimes discrepancies in clicks reported by third-party tracking tools and those reported by Yahoo! Search Marketing. With tracking URLs in place, clicks recorded in your server logs are easier to match with the numbers that we provide.

To enable tracking URLs:

Log into your account.
From the Administration tab, select "Tracking URLs."
Click "Tracking URLs on."
Your URLs will be appended with information that allows you to determine traffic by keyword, match type and raw search query.

Once your tracking URLs are installed, they can provide you with traffic source information.

How Do I Interpret My Tracking URLs?

A tracking URL is a bit of extra text at the end of the normal web address that tells you what site a visitor comes from. To help you get the most detailed information, we recommend that you have a tracking URL specific to your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns.

Source Tracking:
The presence of a tracking URL signifies that the visitor arrived at your site as a result of your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaign.
http://www.electronics-planet.com/television?OVRAW=buy%20plasma%20television&OVKEY=plasma%20television&OVMTC=advanced
The "%20" characters signify a space between the elements of the tracking URL.
Raw Search Query Tracking:
The first element of the tracking URL (OVRAW) denotes the raw search query, or exactly what the user typed in the search box.
OVRAW=buy%20plasma%20television
The raw query is "buy plasma television."
Keyword Tracking:
The second element of the tracking URL (OVKEY) denotes the keyword associated with the raw search query.
OVKEY=plasma%20television
The results returned to the user were based on the keyword "plasma television."
Match Type & Tactic Tracking:
The third element of the tracking URL (OVMTC) denotes the match type and tactic of the ad that was clicked. This enables you to understand how many visitors come from Standard and Advanced matches or Content Match for any given keyword.
&OVMTC=advanced
For example, this particular result was served based on Advanced Match.

How Do I Add Traffic From Other Continents?

Blocked Continents
When you opened your U.S. account or upgraded to the new Sponsored Search platform, the Blocked Continents feature in your account was defaulted to exclude traffic from continents other than North America. If intercontinental traffic is not important to your business, you may find that this capability helps improve your overall conversion rate.

If intercontinental traffic is important to your business, you can choose to change your continent blocking settings. To do so:

Log into your upgraded account and click on the "Administration" tab.
Click the edit button within the Account General Information panel
Deselect the check boxes next to continents from which you would like to receive traffic.