• Why tracking is important
• Getting started
• Using conversion only tracking
• Calculating your ROAS
• Tracking and analyzing your traffic

Why tracking is important

Tracking the performance of your online marketing enables you to effectively analyze 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

Getting started

If you’re ready to start tracking your results, the first thing you must do is determine your desired CPA (cost-per-acquisition), which is the amount of money you’re willing to spend acquiring a new customer.

If you keep your quality index score high, you may achieve a higher position at lower cost: We suggest that you conduct a trial period during which your ads can receive enough clicks to provide you with the data you need. You can achieve that by attempting to obtain a high average position as the business objective for your campaign. Learn more about quality index.

As soon as you have gathered enough information (determining which keywords perform best, and how much you have to spend to win a certain number of customers), you can start optimizing your account: add, remove and modify keywords, improve your ads and adjust your bid.

Using conversion only tracking

Yahoo! Search Marketing offers free, easy-to-use conversion only tracking method (basic tagging) that can help you optimize 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

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 analyzing your traffic

In order to track and analyze the traffic on your web site, you will need to acquire specific software tools or learn how to analyze 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 user 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 optimizing 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.