Configure Paid Search Detection

Hey, what’s up everybody? It’s Doug. In this video, we’re going to look at configuring the Paid Search Detection in the Admin console of Adobe Analytics. So, here I’m in the Admin console, I’ve gone to Admin and Report suites. And so, it lists all my report suites down here, and you just select the one or more that you want to configure. And you go up to Edit Settings and mouse over that, and go to General, and Paid Search Detection right here. So, what exactly am I configuring here? Well, you can see over here, the rules specified below are used to populate the following reports, and this should also say, you know, slash dimensions for analysis workspace. So, you can see here Paid Search Engines and Keywords, Natural Search Engines and Keywords. And I’m going to focus on search engines since it’s really hard to get keyword data these days from the search engines. So basically, we’re going to put a rule down here that is going to say, look, if this is met, this rule is met, then this is definitely a search engine and a paid search engine. So, for example, and we can leave this as any if you’re going to use the same query string parameter for all of them, so you’ll see that I have some here already done. I’m going to grab PSID. How 'about that? For Paid Search ID. And I’m going to select that one. So, any search engine that has a query string that contains PSID, well, we know that that is a search engine, and that it has been used for paid search. So, I can add that and I’ll just click there. And now, it’s down here. Now, I will say this, this is kind of a super-duper legacy configuration and report slash dimension because I’m going to suggest that you do a couple other things maybe instead. This is fine. And I’m going to show you the reports that are a result of this configuration. But I suggest that you use the s.campaign variable or just the campaign variable, in case you know about that. The tracking codes 'cause then you’ll know exactly which ads, which paid search ads are performing on your site. And then secondly, just to know the traffic coming from them generally, I suggest that you use Marketing Channels, and that is configured, if I go here to Edit Settings again and go to Marketing Channels, that is configured here, and is actually kind of newer, even though it’s also been with us for quite a while now, it’s also newer than that Paid Search Detection. And I’ll show you a little bit more about that in the reports. But you know, you can use this, it’s cool, it’s fine. Use it, be happy. But it is probably going to get you more if you use Marketing Channels, and of course tracking codes. So, let’s take a look at what that results in in the reports here. So, I’ve gone over here to my visualizations, and I dragged a free-form table down to the bottom of my panel. And then, I went here to Components, and I typed in paid search. Okay, and that’s good enough. And I dragged that down there as well and added a few metrics, and I’ve got my little table here. And of course, I edited the name of that table as well. But you’ll see what I get here is Paid and Natural. And so, this is by virtue of having that rule that I put in, that I have a number of visits, visitors, and page views that resulted from clicking through from a paid search. And in this case, again, it’s because it saw, first of all, that it came from a search engine, a known search engine. And secondly, that it had that PSID parameter in the query string during that click through when he landed on my site. So that way, it knows that it is traffic that came from a paid search engine. And then, it just includes SEO, natural traffic from those search engines as well. Now, again, I recommend Marketing Channels to understand that traffic. And so, you can see that right up here, I’ve added Marketing Channels as well, and it has a bunch of them, and this is only a handful of them. There’s actually a lot more that is available, including, you can see here, Natural Search, and Paid Search would be here as well. But any other marketing channels or channels that are bringing traffic to your site can be added in the Marketing Channels configuration. And so, it can not only show you the traffic, but it can also show you, as you can see up here, the conversions that happen on your site from traffic that came from these different marketing channels. So, in any case, you can use this Paid Search Detection if you want, but it’s probably better if you just use Marketing Channels. I hope this was helpful as you go through the configuration of your report suites. Good luck. -