• Why is tracking is important
• Options for tracking
• Using conversion only tracking
• Calculating your ROAS
• Tracking and analysing your traffic

Why tracking is important

Tracking the performance of your online marketing enables you to effectively analyse your results, adjust bids and revise ads to make your account more successful. Tracking is essential to help you spend effectively so that you are getting the most out of your advertising investment.

Tracking measures the rate of conversion, which is a completed transaction event on your web site. What constitutes a conversion varies from business to business. The most common conversions are:

• Purchase
• Site registration
• Newsletter sign-up
• Request for price quote
• Other lead-generating activity

Options for tracking

1. Review the Yahoo! Search Marketing reports that provide costs, clicks and impressions at the keyword, ad group or campaign level.
2. Install tracking URLs and analyse the tagged traffic in your server web logs (see example below). With tracking URLs, you will be able to learn:
• Which keyword brought the customer to your site
• What the customer is searching for before clicking your ad
• Which search engine referred the customer to your site

Learn more about Tracking URLs.

Based on this information, you can start optimising your account. For example, you can determine which keywords generated the most traffic, and then bid those keywords aggressively to help generate even more sales.

Using conversion only tracking

Yahoo! Search Marketing offers free, easy-to-use conversion only tracking (basic tagging) that can help you optimise your marketing budget. You simply place a tag on your web site’s confirmation page, and then you can view conversion information in your account.

Click to enlarge

Landing Page
The landing page is the destination of the URL you are using in your ad. It’s the first page a customer gets to see. It is where they start the conversion process (e.g. shopping, submitting information, signing up for a newsletter, etc.).
E-commerce or Sign Up
During this part of the conversion process, the customer is using the e-commerce or the part of the web site where they can submit their address or sign up for a newsletter. The confirmation page will be the last page of this process confirming the purchase or the submission of information.
Confirmation Page
The conversion tag is a short piece of code that is part of the confirmation page’s metadata. Each time the confirmation page is viewed at the end of the shopping process, the page view is counted as one conversion.

Learn more about conversion only tracking

Calculating your ROAS

When your goal is to acquire traffic, your ROAS is calculated as:

Value of Traffic Sold (e.g. your ad revenue)
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Amount Paid for Sponsored Search Traffic (i.e. total click cost)

Tracking and analysing your traffic

In order to track and analyse the traffic on your web site, you will need to acquire specific software tools or learn how to analyse your web log files (see example below). Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) may provide these tools, or you can buy them from a third party (ask your ISP for a recommendation).

Yahoo! Search Marketing provides you with the ability to use tracking URLs, one of the most common techniques that associates where visitors came from with what they do on your site.

With tracking URLs, you will be able to learn:

• Which keyword brought the customer to your site
• What the customer was searching for before clicking your ad
• Which search engine referred the customer to your site

Learn more about Tracking URLs.

Based on this information, you can start optimising your account. For example, you can determine which keywords generated the most traffic, and then bid those keywords higher to help generate even more sales.