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Like everyone else, I am looking for new ways to gather as much keyword data as I can in the wake of the dreaded (not provided) epidemic. This question focuses on keyword data from Paid Search. We all know this is very simple with AdWords because the data is right there in Google Analytics. MSN adCenter, however, is a different story as these parameters need to be added to the end of each destination URL. Here are the parameters I'm using:

utm_source=Bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={QueryString}&utm_content={AdID}&utm_campaign=Leads

Everything is working well with the exception of {QueryString} which is returning nothing. I would really like to solve this issue because I do not have the time to add specific parameters for each keyword in all of my campaigns. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Hi Jasmine,

Thanks for the good information. I have always suspected that the cookie was being dropped in some cases but that has been difficult for me to prove! Checking out Multi-Channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics has given me more confidence that that is the case but it is still not adding up exactly.

Here is something interesting. If I add up all orders with Google affiliate ID's and all orders with a long-string referrer that originates from google.com/cse , google.com/aclk  or google.com/url I get my magic number of 31 conversions which matches what AdWords has. I believe I can pull a report from our database that would populate with just these parameters.

If you have any other ideas though, I'd love to hear them!

Thanks for the quick response! i am checking into this with the person who maintains the database for our store. I believe the answer will be yes because each store order does have a field for the referrer. I can also pull up a monthly Sales by Referrer report that lists the referrers as well as the total number of orders placed from that referrer. Some orders have very clean referrers and others have long and complicated strings originating from Google while others' referrer fields are blank. There seems to be no real consistency there.

Hello! I hope someone can help shed some light on this issue for me because I have searched far and wide for answers to no avail. So, without further ado, here goes...

The destination URL's in our AdWords ads are affiliate redirects with "Google" as the Affiliate Code. Since our products are according to license, we have different price points for the same item number. We cannot get accurate earnings through AdWords. The affiliate redirect records the Google conversion in our store which gives us the ability to associate a dollar amount with conversions as well as compare the number of conversions against what is stated in the AdWords interface.

The problem is that AdWords consistently shows significantly more conversions than our store's affiliate code reflects. For example:

• AdWords Conversions for March 2013: 31
• Store Orders Showing Google Affiliate ID for March 2013: 19

So judging from those numbers it looks like 12 conversions were lost from AdWords reporting to the reporting in our online store. I have checked and double checked that our destination URL's are uniform in their formatting and have the appropriate "Google" affiliate code, so they should be recorded.

Does anyone have any insight or experience with this? Is it possible that our affiliate cookie is somehow being dropped as the user is redirected to the landing page via the destination URL? 12 conversions is a pretty significant difference and since those conversions seem to be getting lost on the way to our store, that's revenue that i'm not able to add to determine the true ROI of the effort.

Can anyone help?