Neil Lemons’ Blog

One of the measures of search engine marketing success is getting keyword targeted traffic through organic or natural listings. This is obvious. Being able to see the difference in paid and unpaid traffic is not so obvious to the beginner, but it is where the truth of success comes. It is no secret that paid traffic can actually have more value per visitor in some industries (if you know what you are doing), than unpaid traffic, but you should never throw the baby out with the bath water. In other industries pay-per-click inflation has gotten the best of bidders. In any case, it’s very important that you tag your paid search campaigns.

Tagging is a fancy word for naming something unique to identify its origin, and it’s highly important to tag your ads through AdWords. For most analytics or web stats programs you have to tag ads manually in which you should use a dynamic string attached to the destination URL. Google Analytics makes it easy on you (in exchange for being Big Brother) and will tell us the difference between paid and unpaid traffic automatically IF one default setting is changed through AdWords.

Here are the easy steps to making this change:

1. Login into AdWords

2. Go to the “My Account” tab, 4th Green Tab on the right

3. Then go to “Account Preferences”

4. Under “Tracking” on the right side, edit and set “Auto-tagging” to “Yes”

By default it is set to “No.”

In the future if you decide to use Yahoo! Search Marketing or MSN adCenter (which I recommend you do), you have to manually tag the ads (adding a bit of description to the destination URL). This way you will be able to tell what is ppc traffic and what is organic from Yahoo and MSN. Use this tagging URL builder.