Today we’re going to give a quick lesson on how to set up keyword tracking with your destination URL’s in your Google AdWords campaign. In Google, as in all the search engines, you want to try and use a separate URL for every keyword in your campaign, so that when you look at your stats, you can instantly see exactly what keywords are generating traffic. It used to be that Google would only allow you set up a single URL for each ad in an ad group, but not for each keyword. Now, if you know how to do it, you can set up a separate URL for each keyword. Here’s how:

First you have to set up your ad group. We’re not going to go through all the steps on setting up ad groups. We’re glossing over that part because you can’t set up the keyword URL’s during the process of setting up your ad group. You have to go back and set up your URL for each keyword in a separate step.

From the Campaign Summary screen, click the name of the ad group for which you want to set up keyword tracking.

Then click the Keywords tab.

Click the checkbox next to “Keywords” on the left-hand side of the keywords table header. This will select all of the keywords.

Click the Edit Keyword Settings button (this is not the same as the “Edit Keywords” link).

On the next screen, fill in your destination URL for each keyword, which will include the keyword itself. You might want to first type a URL without the keyword, such as www.mywebsite.com?keyword=, into the first text box and then click the “V” button next to the top URL textbox to copy the URL to all the other textboxes. Then you can just go from box to box adding the keyword to the URL.

Then click “Save Changes” and you’re all done.

Now when you look at your web stats, you will be able to tell what keywords generated the most traffic because you will see URL’s ending in those keywords.

If you can’t get Google’s own conversion tracking script installed, this is a great way to generate your own data (although it won’t tell you which ones actually converted into customers).

For help managing your Google AdWords campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.