Overview

One of the great benefits of online advertising is how easily and precisely you can monitor results. Measuring and tracking your results are important because:

• They enable you to evaluate your various advertising methods—such as Yahoo! Sponsored Search listings, banners or emails—and make informed decisions about how and where to use your advertising budget.
• If you know how often clicks from your individual Yahoo! Search Marketing ads are converting to sales—and how much profit is generated from each of those sales—you can make changes to your ad copy or your bids to make them even more profitable.
• By monitoring how your listings are performing, you can maximise the efficiency of your campaign and boost your revenue.

Useful Tools

Here are some methods you can use to gather the information needed to calculate the metrics described above:

• Conversion-only analytics
• See if your keywords are getting results by measuring the number of clicks that lead to conversions on your web site.
• You can see conversion data at the keyword, category and account levels for your Sponsored Search and Content Match campaigns, so you can know exactly how each keyword is performing.
• Tracking URLs
• Using tracking URLs makes it easy to gather useful data from your server logs.
• Server logs (also known as web logs) are a record of the activities of your web server kept by the computer hosting your web site.
• These logs are electronic recordings of where your site’s clicks are originating.
• Open the log file in your server software using a text editor such as TextPad.
• This file has an entry for each click that has come to your site.