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Content Match - They Came From Where? 
By: Gary Angel 2006-07-27 Given that you are almost certain to get quite a bit of traffic from bad or inappropriate sites using Content Match (and that traffic doesnt generate sales) its vital... ...that you keep close tabs on what sites are sending you visitors. Its actually quite easy to identify the sites your getting traffic from using most web analytics solutions " but there is one little trick. As youd expect, the information you need is contained within the Referring site field. So you'll start with the Referring Sites (or Acquisition Sources) report in your web analytics tool. Here is a sample referring site record: pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-
As you can see, its a mouthful! Indeed, its the very length of the URL that can cause issues because measurement systems will often display the URL in truncated form (or even truncate the URL to a fixed length of characters). Chances are fair to good that within your tool you won't be able to see the relevant part of the referral. Perched somewhere in the middle of this string are the fields that tell you where your Google Content Match visitor came from. Usually, you can just use one of these " the url field. In our example above, this referrer was from: url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.selfseo.com%2Fcheck_google_pagerank.php Dont be put off by the weird % signs and such. These are just hexadecimal representations of characters. The hexadecimal characters are actually three characters long, so %3A represents a single character (":" of course, with %2F being a forward slash. So our publishing source is really: http://www.selfseo.com/check_google_pagerank.php Actually a pretty good source for our CampaignTracker campaign. Sadly, none of the web measurement tools make it easy to analyze these sources. As you can probably guess by looking at the referring site above, youll rarely get two referrals with identical strings. And in most cases, youll not be able to see the source within the tool anyway. So the little trick I mentioned earlier (and usually your best bet) is to export the referring sites report (usually after sub-setting to just get referrals with google and pub- in them) to Excel. You'll get the full URL (or however much they've saved of it) in the Referring Sites column. In Excel, you can then use string functions to extract the URL and total based on URL. Once youve identified high-volume referrals, you can come back and create campaigns for these Content Match sites. After all that, youll be in a good position to actually monitor which sites work and which dont. In addition, youll almost certainly find a bunch of sites that you dont want your ad to appear on " without even having to test for effectiveness. Fortunately, Google lets you exclude sites " so you can get rid of all this unwanted traffic. Oh " and heres one more word to the wise " Google seems to evaluate your Content campaigns at the first of the month (at least thats been our experience) " so you need to check shortly after each month starts to get rid of all the new "bad" sites that have been added to your campaign. Hey " nobody ever said this was going to be easy! Tag: Google, content match Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Yahoo! My Web |  Furl
Have a bookmark! -  About the Author: Gary Angel is the author of the "SEMAngel blog - Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing practices and perspectives from a 10-year experienced guru. |
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