Panama's great, but you can't track ad copy with it...

Posted by Richard Stokes on June 29, 2007 to

Yahoo's new Panama platform lets you track keyword performance or ad copy performance, but not both...

At the date of this writing, Yahoo is in the middle of rolling out their Panama advertising platform. While Panama includes many compelling additions that make Yahoo a much more attractive advertising medium, it is still very difficult to track Yahoo conversions, especially if you have a large number of keywords or plan on doing ad copy optimization.

This is primarily because Yahoo does not currently offer a method to automatically tag your destination URLs with the keyword phrase that the search engine user typed in.

Consider the tasks you need to do as an advertiser with a modest number of keywords (say 10,000) in order to properly manage a campaign on the Yahoo platform. First, you need to upload all of your keywords, assigning each to an ad group (same as Google).

Next, you need to manually tag each of the destination URLs with the keyword. This is because Yahoo does not provide an automated way to do this (Google provides the {keyword} tag). This is a considerable amount of work, but it can be done with some creative use of Excel.

However, if you want now perform ad copy testing, you are stuck. This is because each destination URL requires a custom tag to track the individual ad performance (in Google Analytics, that tag is "utm_content=1", where 1 is replaced with the version of your ad). Because Yahoo does not allow you to run multiple ads at the keyword level, you now have to choose between not performing ad testing, or performing it at the ad group level (which means you can not track keyword level performance).

So at this time, the only way to track keyword level conversion rates and perform A-B split testing on different versions of ads is to assign one keyword per ad group... hardly a scalable solution.

However, if you are willing to live without A-B testing and are also content to not use a third-party analytics tool to track your keyword data, then Yahoo does provide a means to track conversion data directly within the Yahoo interface.

Here are the steps required to do this:

• Login to your Yahoo! Marketing Solutions account
• Click on the "Administration" tab
• Click on "Analytics"
• Enable analytics by clicking the blue "Enable Analytics" button.
• If the radio button next to "Conversion Only Analytics" is not selected, select it and then click the "Activate" button.
• Choose a revenue value model to assign to each conversion:
  • "Constant Average Value" assigns a fixed value to each successful conversion. This is useful for many lead generation sites.
  • "Dynamic Value" allows you add a script to your conversion page that assigns a specific order amount. If you do not add this script, then you’ll see conversion rates only in your account. For the latest instructions on how to add this script, check the Yahoo help documentation.
• Copy the tracking script provided between the tags on your conversion page.
• Finally, you need to turn on automatic tracking URLs. Click the "Tracking URLs" link at the top of the page. On this page, select "Tracking URLs on" and then click "Save Changes"

That’s it. You should start seeing conversion data in your account from this point on. This data will allow you to start optimizing your Yahoo bids. It will not allow you to conduct A-B split testing however.

If you're supportive of Yahoo and are possibly looking to reduce your dependence on Google, call your Yahoo rep to ask them to add this feature. Hopefully we'll see it soon...!