Getting Search Queries for Google AdWords in Google Analytics – Part 2

Posted by David Whitehouse

Ok so I’ve been doing a bit of research, and I still need to write the script and run a test, but here is the logic I have determined:

If referrer = Google and request_url contains gclid {
utm_keyword = strip_out_search_string(request_url)
}

My only worries is that if you have the Google Adwords Cost Data enabled that despite setting utm_keyword it may overwrite it. This is why I need to do a test. If there are any volunteers, let me know :)

Review of Permission Marketing

Posted by David Whitehouse

So I’ve just finished reading Permission Marketing by Seth Godin, after hearing his name mentioned so much over the past few months I decided I best read one of his books. Permission Marketing was really the book that seemed to make him – the first successful one.

I must say I thought the book was interesting, it talked about how most marketeers are interruption marketeers, whereas he was suggested that they should become permission marketeers. It had a few interesting ideas and some practical tips too, but on the whole the book did go on more than it had to in order to get the point across. Here is how I understood it:

If you do an advert and expect to sell to someone just from one advert then you get bad results, if instead you use the advert to begin a relationship with someone then you can teach them over time about your product, getting more and more trust, until one day you have permission to buy things on behalf of your customer. Amazon seems to be the best example he refers to.

In Internet marketing terms that means attracting people to your site, with the sole aim of getting them to subscribe to your email list/blog. Then over time teaching them and building their trust and then eventually selling to them.

It is also a bit of an old read now, this was before Google AdWords became popular and the big player seems to be Yahoo at the time. I would recommend reading it though as the principles still apply.

On the whole I’d give it 7.5/10. If you want to order the book, you can use the link below to take you to Amazon:

AdWords not linking to Analytics

Posted by David Whitehouse

We had a problem at work the other day where our AdWords account was not linking to Analytics. It wasn’t the autotagging option in AdWords and it wasn’t caused by us not choosing the ‘add cost data’ in Analytics, since this wasn’t an option.

The problem was caused on the 23rd/24th of March – Google switched over to their new system in AdWords, which meant all AdWords accounts can only have one Analytics account against them. Where they messed up was when an AdWords account had an Analytics account against it, it would choose the original. In many cases the original was no longer used and contained no information – something which I think they should have taken into account.

Anyway, to fix it you need to:

  1. log into the account with the email address of the account that was originally used
  2. Click on the Analytics tab
  3. Edit Account Settings
  4. Unlink from AdWords account
  5. Then go back to the Analytics tab and link it to the correct Analytics account (the logon will need access to the account in question)