Search Marketing Sage

While you are well aware of many of the challenges you face when utilizing MSN adCenter, there may be one you may not even realize you’ve run into. Don’t worry, there’s a work-around.  Have you noticed that there’s no Bing (cpc) option for reporting within your Google Analytics account? If you are using MSN adCenter for your paid advertising efforts, all of your traffic is being lumped into the Bing (organic) report in Google Analytics if you are not performing a work-around to bypass this inconvenience.  Google data is already segmented, since you likely have the auto-tagging feature enabled in your AdWords account settings. By using simple URL parameters, you can begin properly tracking your adCenter data within your Google Analytics account, and in turn, stop skewing your Bing (organic) data.

The Work-Around:

The easiest way to start tracking adCenter data is to use the Google Analytics URL Builder tool.  It allows you fill in the appropriate fields with the information you want, and it will automatically generate your full URL to insert as your adCenter destination URLs.  You can control the granularity of reporting with how many fields you enter. The main levels you’ll want to track are the Campaign Source, Campaign Medium, and the Campaign Name. Campaign Source would be Bing (or MSN, Microsoft, etc; I like to stick to Bing since that’s how the organic data is referred to), the Medium would be CPC (or PPC, or Ad), and the Campaign Name should be the cooresponding campaign, exactly as it appears in your adCenter account (to avoid any confusion in the future).

While you may choose to use the tool, it is also pretty easy to customize these manually, as you enter your destination URLs into the MSN interface.  Simply use the same parameters you see above, starting with utm_source=bing, etc. You may choose to simply track these at the campaign level, but if you want, you can track down to the ad and keyword level in addition to that campaign data.

Ad-Level Tracking:

Add &utm_content=Ad%20One, &utm_content=Ad%20Differentiator, etc. to your URL string. Just try to choose “content” references that will allow you to easily recognize which ad the data is for.

Keyword-Level Tracking:

If you don’t have many keywords in your account, you may choose to put the destination URLs at the keyword level, and manually enter in the exact keyword here.  You’ll want to add &utm_term=your%20keyword%20here to your URL string. If you don’t currently have keyword-level destination URLs, there’s a very simple way to still track at the keyword-level. Instead of typing in the exact keyword each time, you’ll be using something like this, &utm_term={Keyword}, where the keyword will automatically be entered when the URL is served up after a searcher clicks on your ad.

The great thing about these custom URL parameters is that this doesn’t just work for MSN adCenter data, you could use it if you want to track activity from any other ad formats leading back to your site.  More insight into your efforts is never a bad thing!