This year I was fortunate enough to attend both PubCon 2010 in Las Vegas and Affiliate Summit East 2011 in New York. I’d like to talk about how they compare for those considering either of these events in the future.

The Content:

PubCon is a huge conference held in the Las Vegas Convention Center. They have a lot of sessions (100-ish) covering SEO, SEM, PPC, Affiliate Marketing and the like. I actually struggled to pick which sessions to attend because inevitably there would be 2 or more sessions going on at the same time that I wanted to attend. Also, because there are so many more people at PubCon sometimes the rooms get full so people actually run from one session to the next to get a good seat. They don’t allow much time between the sessions but they do a good job at providing power strips for laptops at many of the tables.. You’ll also see industry heavy-hitters at PubCon like Matt Cutts, David Pogue, and others.

Affiliate Summit is a smaller event, there are three sessions going on at once and about 40 in total, mostly about Affiliate Marketing though I did attend a few good SEO sessions while here. One thing I noticed is that the Affiliate Summit sessions are a bit higher level, less beginner content compared to what you’ll hear at PubCon. Also, the sessions are spread out over the day with bigger gaps between them so you don’t have to rush however there are no power strips for laptops at the tables.

Winner: PubCon – the volume of choices is nice even though some of the content may be low-level

Logistics:

PubCon is not in a hotel but it’s ‘near’ a hotel but you can’t really walk to it so they have shuttles, which is a pain because at the end of the day everyone wants to take the shuttle back to the hotel at the same time so there were HUGE lines waiting to get back. Also, it was freezing cold and I did not fly out to Las Vegas thinking I would need a winter coat so I had none. On a positive note, the shuttle is yet another chance to do some networking. A few of my most memorable connections were made on the shuttle.

Affiliate Summit, on the other hand, is held inside the Hilton so if you stay in the Hilton you don’t have to even go outside to get to the sessions.

Winner: Affiliate Summit – no shuttles

Food:

PubCon gives you these tickets that are like money and you have choices of vendors to buy food from. The lines were long and some of the vendors were poorly prepared for the rush. It was basically a disaster.

Affiliate Summit hands out meal tickets, you hand them the ticket when you walk in. I never saw a line but I got to lunch kinda late. Hilton caters the lunch and provided a nice assortment of healthy food that was actually really good. Although the deserts were just okay for me dog.

Winner: Affiliate Summit – no lunch lines & better food choices

Audience:

PubCon typically hosts the big names in the industry. It’s common to see folks from Amazon, eBay and just about any other big web presence you can think of. It’s a professional environment and exciting to share ideas with these folks. That said, it’s a slightly older audience hosting people who are later in their careers.

At Affiliate Summit the crowd is younger. You’ll see folks in their clubbing outfits, fresh out of college – some look like they just got out of high school. Not as many heavy hitters but certainly a good collection of talent. Also, if you’re a single guy there are a LOT more beautiful women at Affiliate Summit.

Winner: TIE Affiliate Summit (if you’re single) PubCon if you want to be star-struck

With that said you really can’t go wrong with either of these events, depending on what industry you’re in. Enjoy!

Here is what you must do in order to run a report similar to the image above in Google Analytics that shows you the performance of each of your PPC networks. During my research I ran across a number of blog posts that explained how to do this but what I found was that most of them contained out-dated information. So keep that in mind when you’re doing your research. Always look for the post date to ensure you’re getting the best information. I’ll do my best to keep this post up-to-date as well.

First, traffic from Google AdWords will be tagged correctly, assuming you’ve turned on Tracking. It’s located under My Account – Preferences – Tracking (in the new interface). Check this now and make sure it’s set to ON.

Second, to enable URL tracking for Yahoo Search Marketing in Google Analytics you’ll have to do some tweaking. First, turn off Tracking URLs. That’s right, I said turn them OFF. To do this, visit Administration – Tracking URLs. We’re turning them off because we’re going to tag the URLs ourselves. Next, you’ll want to pull up the Google Analytics URL Builder.

Go ahead and insert your Website URL, which is the landing page you wish to use. For Campaign Source you should use ‘yahoo’, under Campaign Medium use ‘cpc’ for Campaign Term – and here is where it gets tricky – you should use ‘{OVKEY}’. This will trigger Yahoo to automatically replace that string with the keyword which triggered your ad for that click. Under Campaign Content I put the name of the ad group although you can put whatever you want or leave it blank. Yahoo Search Marketing does not have a dynamic trigger for the ad group name. Under Campaign Name again I use the name of the campaign in YSM as they do not have a dynamic trigger for the campaign name either. Finally, click Generate URL then copy & paste this into the Destination URL field when you create an ad in YSM as seen below.

Now we’re going to setup URL tracking for Microsoft adCenter in Google Analytics.  The process here is very similar to what you have to do for Yahoo Search Marketing. The difference here is the string used to capture the keyword in Campaign Term. For Microsoft adCenter you must use ‘{OrderItemId}’. Follow the same steps outlined above. The URL Builder should look like this:

And here is where you paste your Destination URL in Microsoft adCenter.

NOTES:

Editing each of your ads manually will be quite a chore. I highly recommend using something like the Microsoft adCenter Desktop tool for adCenter. And, if you’ve spent enough money with Yahoo Search Marketing you should be able to upload a CSV of your campaign. Use Excel to paste in your URLs and save yourself a lot of time.

Also, keep this in mind; even though the string for Yahoo is {OVKEY} and for adCenter it’s {OrderItemId} you will not see them exactly like that once the Google Analytics URL Builder generates the URL. What’s happening here is the tool re-write those symbols into URL friendly characters so { becomes %7B. THIS WILL BREAK YOUR TAGGING. You must change those back to { and } for these tags to work properly.

Good luck tagging your URLs and please comment below if you have any questions. Thanks for reading!

References:

Tracking URLs in Yahoo Search Marketing

Tracking URLs in Microsoft adCenter

Google Analytics URL Builder

Microsoft adCenter Desktop

April 2010 UPDATE:

I have developed a new application that does all of this automatically. Simply upload your campaign as a CSV file, specify your destination URL and you’re done! Give it a try, its’ free: Campaignsync.

-Jeff