We get a lot of questions about WebTrends tagging instructions for Google AdWords campaigns or Search Engine Advertising campaigns in general. Most of you may know about the existance of the WT.srch=1 parameter but there is more to think about.
If you add the WT.srch=1 parameter a destination URL will look like: www.omtrends.com/?WT.srch=1 This Query Parameter only tells WebTrends that the visitor came from a Paid Search advertisement, nothing less and nothing more.
To determine which Paid Search program was used (ie. Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing), WebTrends will capture the Referral information also. So if this visitor came from an AdWords campaign, WebTrends will see a Referring URL like http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4EGLC_enNL238NL238&q=visual+workstation+hbx and translate this into “Google AdWords”, with help of the file keywords.ini:
[Google AdWords]
ID1=.google.com
KeywordIndicator1=q=
As you can see WebTrends will capture the q= parameter to retrieve the keywords. These are the keywords the visitor used in Google.
So for instance, if I search for “visual workstation hbx”, I might see iMETRIX in one of the Google AdWords advertisements. WebTrends will pick up the Search Phrase “visual workstation hbx” and report this in the out-of-the-box report Most Recent Search Phrases (Paid). Alrighty! you think?
Not really 
WebTrends reports on the Search Phrase the visitor searched on, not the phrase you are advertising on. This means that you cannot match your WebTrends reports with your Google AdWords reports. Let’s say you are advertising Broad Match on the word “HBX” and the user searches at www.google.com on “visual workstation hbx”. Google AdWords will report a clickthrough on the word “HBX” while WebTrends reports “visual workstation hbx”. There is no way to match both reports and if you didn’t know about this - you should have had a lot of discussion with your Google AdWords Professional already.
So now we know that your reports probably aren’t displaying the data you think they are displaying. Let’s fix it rightaway!
We are going to use a Visitor History parameter. WebTrends has 4 available for you; WT.seg_1, WT.seg_2, WT.seg_3 and WT.seg_4. These Visitor History are meant to be used for segmentation purposes but actually can be used for anything you would like to store. A great advantage of using a Visitor History parameter is that it will store the information in a database so that if a visitor visits your site on day 5 of the month through Google AdWords and converts 20 days later, WebTrends will be able to report on this. If you’d use a regular parameter, ie. kw=<keywords>, WebTrends will only be able to report on behavior of the specific visit that has this information.
Ok I assume you are not using the WT.seg_1 yet, so we will add it to your URL. The value will be the keyword that you are advertising on at Google AdWords, resulting in this Query Parameter to be used in your landing page URL: WT.seg_1={keyword:nil} Google AdWords will automatically replace {keyword:nil} with the keyword you were advertising on. In this example it will eventually look like: WT.seg_1=HBX. More information about Google AdWords Keyword Insertion can be found here.
As you can see we also use the WT.mc_id campaign parameter. We add this to see which overall campaign performance in our campaign overview report. The gclid parameter is being added by Google AdWords because of the Google Analytics auto-tagging of AdWords destination URLs.
Eventually, when you would click on the Google AdWords adversitement, the destination URL will look like:
http://www.imetrix.nl/producten/Visual_Sciences.stm?WT.srch=1&WT.mc_id=PRHB&WT.seg_1=hbx&gclid=CKemrfi56I8CFQuuQwod6hU4Dw
As you might have noticed I’ve taken a long holiday. Not really. Just before Christmas I decided to leave my job at iMetrix and start as an independent online marketing consultant. This is the reason of a somewhat long absence.
