Search Advertising Gets Better Analytics

January 26, 2006

Yahoo! and Google have recently added more sophisticated analytics tools for advertisers in their paid-search-advertising programs, Yahoo! Search Advertising and Google AdWords, according to this article from Direct: "Search Engines Add DM Tools."

The new tools can be especially helpful for small and midsize advertisers who are less likely to employ complex and expensive third-party analytics services.

Describing Yahoo!'s offering, provided for a fee�through a partnership with Marketing Management Analytics (MMA),�the Direct�article says, "The service will roll up advertisers' total offline spending to produce a focused ROI comparison of offline promotions to online marketing on Yahoo! Search Marketing," and also quotes MMA's COO Ed See: "We've created a specific analytic product for Yahoo! clients who are interested in understanding better how their online ads are performing, how much money to move into or out of online, and the interactions between online and offline spending for all the various marketing levers."

Here is a tool that Yahoo! Search Marketing calls the Marketing Console:

And this one is called the Conversion Counter:

Google's free Google Analytics service is based on capabilities acquired when it bought Urchin Software recently.�Direct says Google Analytics "integrates with AdWords, but it also can monitor ad and Web-page performance on other advertising networks, including those from Yahoo! and MSN Search" and "advertisers should be able to track user clickthroughs from ad to landing page, or within Web sites, and their return on investment for those keyword terms." In addition, the system can be used to monitor the results from other ad media such as banners, email and referral links.

These images will give you an idea of the Google Analytics interface: