Walk Through of SA360 RSA Conversion Tracking Implementation (plus bonus Marin how-to!)

Catalyst’s Cara deBeer attended SMX West 2019 to join the insightful paid search panel “Ad Testing In A Multi-Format World.” As part of the panel, Cara focused on how to analyze and understand RSA performance by examining important KPIs. In her presentation, Cara discusses how to implement SA360. Here is her step-by-step guide for implementing SA360 and her steps for separating RSA results from ETA results. You can also access Cara’s full SMX West presentation here on the Catalyst SlideShare.

Walk Through of SA360 Implementation

  1. Add one keyword per ad group, PAUSED, with keyword level landing page URL
    • I call mine “placeholders” since that was pretty far from anything I’m running on purposefully. You only need one dummy keyword per ad group.
  1. Upload paused new keywords and sync with SA360
  2. Download new keywords with campaign and ad group info, as well as KWGID (ad group ID) and LID (KW ID)

SA360

  1. Sort by campaign, then ad group
  2. Concatenate ad custom parameters so you end up with {_dssagcrid}=lid=43700037057621451&ds_s_kwgid=58700003839284451

SA360

  1. Add the custom ad parameter to each RSA by:
    • Go into AdWords editor and download all your RSAs with campaign, ad group, headlines and descriptions
    • Sort by campaign and then ad group
    • Add the custom ad params to each RSA

Marin How-To

  1. Placeholder ad is set up – copy the ad’s publisher id
  2. In Marin set a creative level tracking template for the placeholder ad and swap out {creative} w/ the placeholder ad’s publisher id. And clear out the creative-level {_mkwid}
    • Note: technically Creative-level {_mkwid} can also be removed from url builder custom parameters since it’s not required for attribution
  3. Use the Preview URL for the placeholder ad to set the RSA tracking template at the ad level. This is because the preview url swaps out campaign level custom parameter values with the actual values

More Thought-Leadership from Cara

Looking for more thought-leadership from Cara? Check out her other blog posts:

Catalyst Webinars:

Blog Posts:

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