It is a common mistake among online retailers. You placed a huge message advertising the sale on your home page, key landing pages and your order confirmation page. You sent out a special sale message to your email marketing campaign list. However, you forget to update your paid search to let the rest of the online world know you are having a sale.

Adding a new campaign and/or ad groups particularly targeting the sale may work the best, depending on your campaign structure. This may include duplicating keywords. You’ll need to “pause” duplicate keywords in their usual ad group, so they are trigged by the new sale ad group. Remember to turn them back on once the sale is over.

Here is a quick list of suggestions:

• Ads should include the sales information. Indicate the incentive, percentage/amount off, free shipping, no sales, tax, etc. Don’t forget image ads are a colorful and vibrant way to indicate a sale.
• Include the word “sale” (or similar) in the display URL of the sale ads (e.g. Sale.LeverInteractive.com)
• Create new keyword phrases by taking existing keywords and adding “sale,” “discount,” “clearance,” “deal,” etc. to them (e.g. if your keyword is “ceiling fan” create a new keyword phrase of “ceiling fan sale”). Remember to check your negative keyword list.

Run frequent sales? It is best to optimize your campaign structure to quickly and easily update your campaign for advertising your sales.

Need help? Contact Lever Interactive for paid search management services. We can help identify the best structure, ad text, and keywords for your campaign.

As savvy webmasters and marketers installed Google Analytics and maintained the conversion counter, they discovered that the numbers (conversions and sales value) the conversion counter reported looked different (often very different) than Google Analytics numbers.   There are a few reasons for this (none of which are really explained by Google’s help entry on the topic):

1. Date-of-click vs. Date-of-sale - Google conversion counter attributes a conversion (and sales value)  to the date of when a customer clicked on the ad.  Google Analytics attributes the transaction to the date of the sale.   For example, if I clicked on an Adwords ad on May 1, but then came back to the site through anyother means besides clicking on the ad again (ex. bookmark, direct) and purchased on May 15, Google conversion counter would attribute the conversion to May 1.  Google  Analytics would attribute the sale to the date of the sale – in this case, May 15.  (Note:  This gets tricky when you are looking at visitors who click at the end of one month, and purchase in another.  See Adwords Tip: Run Look back reports when using conversion counter)
2. Separate Cookies - GCC and GA are on two separate systems (GA is built on the old Urchin platform).  With cookies coming from separate servers, there is bound to be cookies that may be dropped by one system and not the other.  Users may also be blocking one and not the other as well.
3. Improper/Missing Page Tagging – Proper installation of the tracking codes on landing and receipt pages is critical with any tracking system.  Nine times out of ten, improper or missing code installation is the root of reporting issues.  Make sure you follow the instructions provided for both codes and TEST, TEST, TEST.  The first thing to check when you see no data coming in – are the pages still tagged with the codes.
4. Improper URL tagging – Google has made is very simple for Adwords advertisers to link their campaigns into an GA profile.  Using the auto-tagging feature, it’s the click of a button and your campaign data is feed into GA.  Still, there are those who manual tag Adwords destination URLs, and simple tagging errors can reek havoc on your Analytics reporting.  Again, test often, especially if your site is frequently updating pages/code.