8 replies to this topic

[GregOne]

Is it possible to find out which keywords trigger your Adwords ads? It would be great if you could see broadmatch type keyword phrases that your ads trigger, I just can't think of a way how it's possible to get a list of them.

Edited by GregOne, 18 May 2005 - 09:19 AM.

[Haystack]

That info isn't available through Adwords, but it's in your logs. Here's one way to do it: Tag your matching options with a variable that differentiates between exact, phrase, and broad matching. Then query your logs for the phrase and broad matching to find the actual terms searched for.

Here's the tool I helped develop to make this relatively easy to set up:
http://support.webst...url-creator.asp

[GregOne]

There's no way to figure out which keywords cause your ads to appear on Google if no one clicks on them? BTW- Great little tool over there, thanks!

Edited by GregOne, 18 May 2005 - 09:54 AM.

[Haystack]

Ahh, without clicking on them? No. I think that's limited to keyword research with an emphasis on discovering negative keywords.

[DanThies]

Even when the ads are clicked on, you don't always get the information in your referral logs. Visitors who have some personal firewalls and privacy protection applications (like Norton) do not send information on the referring URL.

BTW, for anyone who is using tracking variables in URLs for Adwords or any other advertising, make sure that you use robots.txt to keep spiders from crawling those URLs, or make sure that the tracking URL redirects (with a 301 Moved Permanently response) to a version of the URL that you do want spidered. Google does find these tracking URLs and you don't want to throw duplicate content at a search engine.

<added>That is a very nice tool/solution, Ed.</added>

Edited by DanThies, 18 May 2005 - 07:09 PM.

[GregOne]

Dan, very interesting! Why is this so? I have noticed this a few times, but never would I have imagined it would be due to a firewall or even a Norton program.

[dawndelcastillo]

not sure if this is correct but is it because they do block cookies and information from being sent and received? I notice the trend of no refer is increasing.

[Randy]

IMHO it's boils down to a simple over-reaction to the security concerns some have. There's nothing whatsoever that is dangerous in sending referrer information. No more than cookies are dangerous.

That's basically what amounts to Greg.

Normally when you're on one page and click on a link to another page the browser will automatically send the location of the first page as a text string to the second page. Some of these security packages disallow this type of information to be sent.

Where it gets dicey is when you have a page on your site somewhere that requires such data to move forward.

I have one site that has something like this. In that in order to pick up the files you've purchased you have to be coming from my domain to actually get to the files to download them. I do it so that I can make sure nobody is hotlinking to those files from another site, bypassing the purchase routine. But if someone's browser doesn't pass this referrer information, or if someone comes from a hot link on another site, they get an error message.

I do that because it's easier than generating a temporary username/password for people to use, then praying that they can type the in the logon information correctly. It's not a huge deal, but I would estimate that 1 or 2 out of each hundred legitimate purchasers end up having to email me for help because their firewall is automatically blocking the referrer information.

FWIW, the most common problem with refusing to pass referrer infomation probably affects those Contact Forms you see on so many sites. One of the ways that most of those mail forms try to make sure a spammer doesn't take them over is to check that the submission is taking place from the domain that houses the forms. That's pretty a pretty standard setup for those mail forms. And works quite well to keep the mail form secure I might add.

[DanThies]

I don't think we need to worry about our log files becoming useless, but referrer data is not sent by all users, and the number is increasing.