Microsoft Advertising adcenter Campaign Analytics Getting Started Guide

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Introduction

What is Microsoft Advertising adCenter Campaign Analytics?

In fall 2010, adCenter introduced Campaign Analytics, a smart new tool for helping you to get your campaigns up and running quickly. Campaign Analytics, including conversion tracking, is available to all adCenter advertisers—whether you’re already using adCenter or you’ve just transitioned your account from Yahoo! Search Marketing this fall.

Campaign Analytics gives you a number of great ways to measure your campaign performance. Here are just a few:

 Track multiple conversion goals and steps toward those goals.

 Track revenue and costs related to conversions.

 Run user segmentation reports.

 Perform keyword-level analysis.

Campaign Analytics reports provide information about site-visitor activity that occurs on your website as a result of your paid search campaigns—including conversions, revenue from conversions, advertising costs, assists, and other visitor-related data.

Additionally, the reports cover such information as sources of traffic to your website and

segmentation by attributes such as age group, gender, and geographical location.

Useful terms

Conversion: A conversion is a transaction that an

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advertiser desires, such as completing a form, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase

Conversion tracking: Conversion tracking is functionality that provides data and about the quantity of

conversions that result from advertising campaigns. Conversion tracking can also provide useful information about the visitors who click an ad and complete a transaction.

Campaign Analytics: Campaign Analytics provides data about conversions and site-visitor behavior,

typically the steps leading to a conversion. Conversion tracking is one piece of Campaign Analytics.

Tracking code: Tracking code is a small piece of JavaScript that is placed in the source code of a webpage

and enables adCenter to collect data about conversions and campaign effectiveness.

Conversion tag: A conversion tag is a type of tracking code that records completed transactions.

Overview

In this guide, we’ll walk you through four steps to get up and running with AdCenter Campaign Analytics: Step 1: Enable Campaign Analytics

• Before you can begin to use Campaign Analytics, set up your adCenter account to begin tracking conversion data.

Step 2: Configure conversion goals and steps

• You may have multiple goals for your ad campaigns.

• Each campaign goal might have multiple steps, depending on your needs. For instance, a website whose primary goal is to have users make a purchase might track different steps, such as visiting the site’s home page, clicking a product link, adding an item to a shopping cart, and making a purchase. You can track how many of your users are completing each of these steps. Step 3: Get and apply tracking codes

• Add tracking code snippets to key pages on your website, so that adCenter can record site-visitor activity in a way that provides the campaign insights that you want.

Step 4: Configure custom dimensions (optional)

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Get Started

Step 1: Enable Campaign Analytics

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Under Performance Analysis Tools, click Campaign Analytics to configure settings. Click Edit next to Tracking Status to access the conversion tracking settings.

Click the radio button to Enable conversion tracking.

Important! To enable conversion tracking for all of your adCenter campaigns, de-select Limit to

individual campaign conversions only. If the box is checked, you can enable conversion tracking

manually for each of your campaigns.

Step 2: Configure Campaign Goals and Steps

Once Campaign Analytics is enabled, your Campaigns tab in adCenter will include a goals table that lists your conversion goals. Click Create goal to define the action that you want your site’s visitor to

complete (such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter).

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Then, choose your Goal settings.

Give your new goal a name (e.g. Sell product). You are required to include conversion steps toward your goal; if you create a goal with only one step, you will be tracking only conversions. To track the full performance of your campaign, outline additional steps.

Steps as defined in Campaign Analytics relate to the stages in your website’s campaign conversion funnel, which is the series of actions that your user must take from entering your web site until completing a conversion.

Each step in a conversion goal can be one of three types: Land, Browse, or Prospect.

 Land: The first page accessed on a site

 Browse: General information screens or a list of products

 Prospect: Information viewed just before completion of the conversion

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In this example, landing page is a

Land step, and add to shopping cart

and enter payment are Prospect steps. The final step, confirm purchase, is the Conversion step. Campaign Analytics offers the ability to define up to five steps toward each goal.

In addition to the steps toward conversion, you may also configure revenue and cost tracking.

Additionally, you can use the conversion period setting to adjust the timeframe in which Campaign Analytics tracks events. The default conversion period is seven days.

Click Save and generate code when you have finished defining your campaign goal.

LANDING PAGE (PRODUCT DETAIL)

ADD TO SHOPPING CART

ENTER PAYMENT

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Step 3: Get and Apply Tracking Codes

For each of the steps you defined in your campaign goal, the tool will generate tracking codes. You must add these tracking codes to the source, or HTML, code on your website. Once you have defined the steps that make up your goal, scroll down to the bottom of the campaign goal screen to view the codes. A drop-down field will include your defined steps; click through them to view the different codes.

The HTML in the code window must be copied and inserted into the HTML code of the page on your site that matches each step. For instance, if you defined a step called “Landing page” in your goal, choose that step in the drop-down, then copy the tracking code into the HTML of your ad’s Landing Page. Retrieve the tracking code for each of the steps you selected and copy the code into the appropriate pages of your website.

Important! Each conversion step that you’ve defined will have a different tracking code. This allows adCenter to know how to count each step in your reports. Be sure that each step you define

corresponds to a single page on your site. No page on your site should have more than one adCenter Campaign Analytics code.

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You may define up to six goals for each account. To delete a goal, click its corresponding checkbox in the Goals table, and choose Delete.

Step 4: Configure Custom Report Dimensions (optional for advanced

users)

Custom report dimensions allow you to track the performance of ad campaigns served through third-party services, enabling you to conveniently view all your ad campaigns in one tool. These might include display campaigns, email campaigns offering product discounts, or campaigns running through other search engines. The available dimensions are: tactic, channel, third-party campaign, third-party ad group, and third-party term.

Append the dimension parameters to the third-party ad’s destination URL, using the URL’s query string (the characters “?key1=value1&key2=value2” at the end of the URL) and to the webpage tracking code. When a visitor views a tagged web page, adCenter logs the data, including the dimension parameters, which it obtains from the query string appended to the webpage URL (e.g.,

www.contoso.com/vacations/fall-discount.aspx&tactic=email&channel=G&campaign=PNW). The dimension parameters record a user visit generated from a third-party campaign, plus a few details about that campaign, as defined by you.

You can configure Custom report dimensions. Click Add custom dimension to begin.

Choose a dimension Type.

• Select Tactic to specify the type of advertising service, such as affiliates, email, or pay-per-click. • Select Channel to specify the advertising channel, for example, Google or Price.com.

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Next, key and value correspond to the “key=value” portion of your URL’s query string (e.g.,

www.contoso.com/page?key=value). You are allowed one key for each dimension you define and up to 100 values for each key.

Because URLs can only contain certain characters and have length limitations, the custom dimensions feature allows users to define values in a “name**value” format.

 Name is how you would like the value represented in reports

 Value is how the value is spelled in the URL.

Example: You are running an ad campaign on Price.com, and you would like that campaign to be

represented in adCenter’s Campaign Analytics. You create a custom dimension with the following settings:

Type: Channel

Key: chn

Value: Price.com**prcom

The URL described by these settings includes the query string “chn=prcom” (e.g.,

www.contoso.com/page?chn=prcom), and “Price.com” is how the value would be represented in the Campaign Analytics reports.

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Conclusion

Once you have defined at least one campaign goal and the tracking codes have been installed in your site, data about user visits will flow to the Campaign Analytics tool, and you can expect to be able to pull reports on that data about four hours after each event.

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Reporting features

Campaign Analytics reports provide information—such as conversions, revenue from conversions, advertising cost, and other visitor-related data—about site-visitor activity as a result of your paid search campaigns. Additionally, the reports provide insights into other information, such as sources of traffic to your website and segmentation by attributes such as age group, gender, and geographical location. The Campaign Analytics reporting options are integrated with other adCenter reporting features in the

Reports tab.

The Campaign Analytics report types include:

• Conversions: Impressions, clicks, conversions, and revenue • Goals: Performance statistics

associated with each step leading to the goal*

• Traffic sources: Conversions and goal data by traffic source domain name*

• Segments: Conversion and goal data by geographic and

demographic attributes*

• Tactics and channels: Performance of ad campaigns served through third-party advertising channels*

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Report details

Conversions: Analyze the performance of advertising campaigns

Goals: Performance statistics associated with each step leading to your campaign goal. In order to

configure a goal report, you must have implemented at least one goal in your Campaign Analytics configuration.

Traffic sources: Conversion and goal data by traffic source (domain name of originating visit). Traffic

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you must have implemented at least one goal in your Campaign Analytics configuration.

Segments: Conversion and goal data by geographic and demographic attributes of your site’s visitors.

Segment reports help you better reach targeted audiences. In order to configure a segments report, you must have implemented at least one goal in your Campaign Analytics configuration.

Tactics and channels: Performance of ad campaigns served through third-party advertising channels. In

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campaigns screen (see Step 4 of the Get Started section in this guide).