Yahoo for Easy Track (Overture)

Tracking the specific keyphrase that drives paid search is a critical component of using analytics to drive your online marketing, but the process of tagging your PPC URLs to provide you with data has been a painful incremental step in an already cumbersome process. Not any more - at least on Yahoo Search.

Yahoo Easy Track automatically adds the keyphrase you purchased, the keyphrase the user searched, and the search type (content, standard, or advanced) to the inbound URL so your analytics package can capture and parse this data.

Google Adwords should add this feature immediately!

(Yahoo's help file describing this feature is in the extended entry.)

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What is Yahoo! Easy Track?

Yahoo! Easy Track is designed to provide more detailed information to advertisers who analyze their Web server logs. By clicking the "On" button, your existing URLs will be appended with information that will allow you to determine traffic by keyword, match type and raw search query.

Please Note: Yahoo! Easy Track may not be appropriate for all advertisers. While Yahoo! Easy Track has been designed to work with a broad set of technologies and platforms, we recommend that you test your links and closely monitor your traffic after opting in to this feature. There are several reasons why Yahoo! Easy Track may not work:

* Collision: You may already be using one of the parameter names Yahoo! uses within your URL (OVKEY, OVRAW or OVMTC)
* Length: Adding this extra information may exceed the URL length that your system can handle (usually up to null characters)
* Brittleness: Your system may only function with a single source variable
* Formatting: Your URL may require "non-standard" formatting to work. For example, your system uses a "#" symbol instead of a "?" to indicate the start of the query string. Check with your ISP or Webmaster if unsure.

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What are the values I might see for each tracking parameter for Yahoo! Easy Track?

OVKEY will show the keyword (or phrase) you entered, e.g., Used Car
OVRAW will show the keyword (or phrase) a search user entered, e.g., Honda Used Cars
OVMTC will show the Traffic Type used to match your keyword with the user's keyword - Content, Standard, and Advanced

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How will the parameters for Yahoo! Easy Track appear in my Web logs?

With Yahoo! Easy Track enabled, you'll see three additional parameters (and their corresponding values) appended to your existing URLs.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at April 17, 2005 10:51 AM