Introduction

Paid search allows advertisers to match sales to corresponding ad expense, buying more of what works and less of what doesn’t. But do you really know what’s working? You don’t if your data are inaccurate. Reviewing performance data from search marketers over the last three years, our firm has found significant data errors in almost one quarter of the programs.

So can you trust your search numbers? Conduct a data audit to see. The effort is modest: after collecting information from internal systems, from your search marketing agency (if any), and from the engines themselves, someone on your staff with decent Excel skills can perform an audit in a few hours. Here’s how.

Test Orders

Placing test orders verifies that your system properly credits orders to search. (Side benefit: you’ll re-experience your own checkout, leading to usability improvement ideas.)

Open up Internet Explorer. Clear cookies. Take a phrase you’re advertising on Google broad match (”widgets”) and Google search for it with a test id appended (”widgets test_1″). Click through on your ad and place a small order with multiple items. (Hint: “4444444444444448″ is a bogus VISA which passes checksum tests.) Next, delete your cookies and restart IE. Go directly to your site (don’t click through on an ad) and place another order. Repeat this sequence using Yahoo, generating two more orders. Repeat this sequence using FireFox - four more orders, for a total of eight.

Check only the first, third, fifth, and seventh orders appear in your paid search order detail report. Make sure item quantities, prices, searched phrase, and advertised phrase are correct.

Order Audit

Pick a day. Obtain a search order detail report for that day, showing timestamp, order total, items, and IP for every order that day credited to paid search. Obtain a list of all web orders from your site that day, showing timestamp, IP, order total, items, and - most important -marketing channel to which your site credited the order (unknown, search, email, affiliate, portal, etc.)

Compare the two lists. Does the search order detail report contain orders your web site did not see, or contain orders that your site assigned to other channels? Are some orders being counted multiple times? Is search taking credit for orders beyond a reasonable click-to-order interval?

Expense Audits

Pick a calendar month. Obtain authoritative ad costs for the month from actual Google and Yahoo invoices. Obtain authoritative daily ad costs for the same period from the engines themselves (easily obtained from their public interfaces - log in yourself, or ask your agency). Finally, obtain monthly costs from your weekly search performance reports from your agency or in-house team.

Compare these three sets of costs, in aggregate and by day. For the month, they should differ 1% or less. Remember, data from the engines are authoritative - your other reports must tie to those.

Running such audits semi-annually ensures that your search marketing data are solid. May all your reports be accurate and all your campaigns profitable!