Is Your Yahoo and Bing Paid Traffic Showing as Organic in Google Analytics? Here is How to Fix it.

Posted on: November 28th, 2014 by John

When running a PPC campaign of any sort, getting accurate data on performance is incredibly important. This is what will allow you to fine tune your strategy to ensure you get the maximum CTR from the very most targeted and highly relevant traffic.

If you are using Bing and Yahoo then, it can be very helpful to have all that information available in Google Analytics alongside the rest. This will make it as easy as possible for you to quickly check how your ads are performing versus your organic traffic. Are you get worthwhile ROI for your efforts? Do you need to change your keywords?

To find out, you need to change your destination URLs in order to provide effective tracking by Analytics. This way you can differentiate visitors from your paid results versus organic search and you can identify precisely which of your ads is bringing in the most traffic.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool already for tracking visitors from Google, so all you need to do is to make a few changes with a workaround that will let you see the CPC coming from your CPC from search engines other than Google. I.e. Yahoo and Bing…

Fortunately things have been made a little bit easier since 2010 when Yahoo integrated their campaign management tools into Bing’s (which is called ‘Adcenter’). This makes the process even simpler and easier. Just follow the instructions below and you’ll be able to get all your information in one place with Google Analytics…

Step by Step Instructions for Viewing Bing and Yahoo PPC Data in Google Analytics

Step 1

First you need to create a custom tracking URL. You can do this by using the URL Builder provided by Google (see here).

Just follow the instructions as they come up on the screen and you’ll get your own custom URL string. You can include a unique identifier like ‘Bing-PPC’ which will help you to identify it even more easily.

Step 2

You should see a parameter that says ‘keyword’. Replace this with any placeholder and when Bing generates ads this will be automatically populated. Where it says ‘Campaign Term’ in Google’s instructions use the term ‘{QueryString}’ or ‘{KeyWord}’. Now when someone sees and clicks on one of your ads, you’ll be able to see which search term they used in order to see that ad.

Step 3

Head to the Bing Adcenter and here use the custom URL you just created as your tracking URL in the campaign.

Change the ‘Destination URL’ at the Ad Group Level to make sure that you aren’t using the same URL for every single keyword. To do this, choose ‘Ad Group’, then ‘Ads Tab’. From here you want to click on ‘Ad Title’ and this will give you the option to paste your destination URL. Remember to click save before exiting!

Do the same for each ad group. It shouldn’t take too long unless you have a massive campaign.

Step 4

Once you’ve done this you will start to see your data but this is going to be the combined data from both Bing and Yahoo. If you want to break it down so that you see the specific metrics for each then things will get a little more complicated.

First you’ll need to set up a new profile in Analytics. Now you can create a new filter (use the Admin section of Analytics). Here you’ll want to place the following in Field B:

Extract B case is: http?://([^/]+)

You don’t really need to know what’s going on here but suffice to say that the referring domain will now show with the campaign source which will let you tell whether your clicks came from Bing or Yahoo.

Step 5

It will take a couple of days for these changes to take effect. Come back in two days and you should start to see your data clearly divided by source and whether or not it was paid traffic. It should look as follows:

Bing / CPC

Bing / Organic

Google / CPC

Google / Organic

Yahoo / CPC

Yahoo / Organic

If that’s what you see then congratulations – you’re good to go! Remember though, search engines do make changes to the way they work from time to time so you might need to take further action in future. For now though, enjoy all those metrics and use it to hone your campaigns to perfection!