Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Paid Search Verification Opportunities
in my role as the COO of indextools, now Yahoo! Web analytics, i can attest to the
fact that a large portion of our technical support hours and efforts was and partially
still is spent on maintaining paid search cost tracking.
paid search analytics is the lesser of two evils in a cutthroat paid search competi-
tive world. it tends to fail or at least create challenges such as these:
t
here are multiple search engines, with ever-changing setups and guidelines.
t
here are multiple apis that often change.
t
here might be agency partners working the paid search element who are not in
touch with the web analytics teams.
t
here are typically thousands and thousands of keywords, and most of the time
even thousands of landing page UrLs.
Yahoo! Web analytics has a feature under settings that essentially eliminates
support from paid search engines to create a more powerful self-service environment.
this is called LCa troubleshooting, but i think it likely you will see this renamed.
LCa stands for Live Cost analysis. LCa troubleshooting allows you to check
the ppC results obtained by the system against the click and cost data provided by the
paid search engines. LCa troubleshooting provides a page that shows whether the
system encountered any problems when retrieving data from paid search engines (see
Figure 3.18).
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Figure 3.18 LCA Troubleshooting results
most paid search engines, for obvious reasons, are unable to provide same-day
reporting, and therefore LCa troubleshooting data is available only up until the previ-
ous day.
as you noticed in Figure 3.18, the system checks for the following types of
potential errors:
Login Failed the credentials provided under settings > paid search setting are not
valid or even more likely (if it is google), the google mCC information is missing
or is inaccurate.
No Matching Campaigns Found One or more landing page target UrLs used in the paid
search engine cannot be mapped to any paid search campaigns set up on Yahoo! Web
analytics Campaigns.
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