‘Dear Inside AdWords…’ – Tracking clicks, comparing performance, and looking for URLs

We've been getting a lot of questions lately, so let's get right to them--here are a few more from our mailbox!

Can campaign performance (clicks, impressions, etc) be observed by country/region? I am planning to expand my current campaign from the US only to worldwide. – Jessica M.

Dear Jessica: While at present you can't view campaign statistics by country/region, an easy way to compare performance across different countries or regions would be to set up separate campaigns for each of your geographical regions and label them accordingly. Then, you can create a report that includes the campaigns for which you want to compare performance.

Recently I have changed most of the destination URLs in our ads from going to our homepage to going straight to specific pages on our site. My question is: is there an easy way to look at search through all of the destination URLs in my account to make sure that I haven’t missed any? – Don M.

Dear Don: We’re glad you asked. The Find and Edit Ad Text tool will allow you to quickly locate ads in your account based on search terms you specify. The tool will also allow you to quickly replace ad text or URLs all at the same time! Check out one of our previous posts for a more detailed explanation.

Is there an easy way to differentiate between my organic search hits and my paid hits? I think even if I create a different landing page that I only use for my pay-per-click ads, there is a strong likelihood that the page would be crawled by Google and therefore show up in unpaid search results. – Ed P.

Dear Ed: The easiest way to differentiate your organic versus paid clicks is to utilize ValueTrack in your destination URLs for your AdWords ads. By adding the ValueTrack parameters to your URLs, you will not only be able to differentiate between your search and content clicks, but also see which clicks came from organic search. The key lies in your site's web logs. Your internet service provider should be able to provide you with a report listing the details of your website’s traffic—more specifically, how each of your site's visitors arrived at your site and on which page they first landed when they got there.

After you implement ValueTrack parameters in your ads' destination URLs, all AdWords traffic will show up in your weblogs as "hits" on the following example URL:

www.YourSite.com?type=GoogleAdWordsSearch , for clicks from the Google search network,
or
www.YourSite.com?type=GoogleAdWordsContent , for clicks from the content network

These hits should be originating from a click on an ad on google.com or one of our search or content partners. You can verify this by checking the referrer URL of each hit. For example, a click on your ad from Google search would look like:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=XYZ
(where "XYZ" is the keyword the user typed in order to see the results and ads which led to your site)

Your other clicks, originating from organic search results or links, will show up as "hits" on:

www.YourSite.com

Because you're using ValueTrack, you don't have to set up a separate landing page for your AdWords traffic. (Similarly, you can also get the same site traffic information using web analytics software such as Google Analytics or other third-party web analytics programs.) For more information on ValueTrack, check out one of our prior posts.

Keep your questions coming; you know we love hearing from you.

Posted by Vivian, Inside Adwords crew