When you enable campaign tracking URL’s in Google using their ValueTrack tag, there’s quite a lot of information you can collect. It’s an extremely valuable option which anyone running a PPC campaign should enable.

What it does is allow your analytics software to track individual PPC campaigns more precisely. I wish every ad network offered a similar feature: it makes your campaign tracking much more transparent, and makes it a lot easier to understand what is actually going on within individual campaigns.

Have you ever looked at your stats and wondered if you paid for all those clicks from China when your campaigns were geo-targeted to the U.S. only? Have you tried running one campaign weekdays and a different one on weekends, and been left wondering if the ads ran properly, or if you paid for the clicks that came through from a campaign on the wrong days? The ValueTrack tag lets your analytics reports drill into this information easier.

Even with the ValueTrack tag turned on, it’s still not simple, which is why we built PPC Assurance.

But one thing that has become apparent is Google update times. Since we’re monitoring so many campaigns, a really clear understanding of how quickly Google responds to changes in your campaign settings or configuration is pretty obvious; you can actually see it in the graph below.

Some people believe that if you make a campaign update, the effect is immediate. It’s not. It takes a while not only to get “published” but also to get published across the network. First off, many changes will take until the next day to be promoted to the live network. But some changes will take a few days to make it to live status across the entire ad network. Here’s an example:

For purposes of explaining data, we use 4 colors:

• Green: Good PPC traffic: It matches what you set for campaign parameters.
• Yellow: This traffic does not match your campaign settings, but due to the number of invalid clicks you were credited for, we’ve established you did not pay for it. So, it’s deemed “acceptable.”
• Red: This is traffic you paid for, and it did not match your campaign settings. We term it “undesired” traffic. You’ve paid for it, and you ought not have.
• Gray: this is “missing” traffic. Don’t worry about this at the start of the campaign, but you need to watch it as a campaign unfolds. In this case it reflects traffic which is not matching the campaign parameters as set. It’s not actually missing, it’s not matching, because the campaign info from the ValueTrack tag was not being transmitted. The amount of PPC traffic could be ascertained, but not matched to which campaign it belonged at the granular level.

So Gray (or grey depending on where you are sitting :-)) is the color you need to focus on in this example screenshot. The reason it’s gray in this example is because up until June 25, there was no tracking code enabled. We were able to validate that there was traffic to the site from the various PPC Campaigns, not if it matched the settings on a granular campaign by campaign basis, (we can work without the ValueTrack tag, but for this example we’re not doing so). We added the ValueTrack Tag to each of the customer’s campaigns early in the morning on June 25, but it was only midday (12:00 PST) on the 26th when Google’s network actually started referring traffic with the tracking tag information attached. It took until June 29 for all referrals to start incorporating the tag.

So, when you make an update to a Google PPC Campaign, where you are adding a tracking tag, be aware that the change is not immediate. It seems to be pretty consistent that most of Google’s adservers will update within 24 hours, but that it can take up to four days for it to propagate fully.

Once the integration period is over, you need to watch for the grey spikes for a completely different reason. But I’ll post about that at a later date.