John Chow has actually stopped reviewing sushi restaurants and made a useful post for a change. I know, it’s hard to believe. I’ve been subscribed to his feed for quite a while, and this is the first post I’ve read all the way to the end in months.

Take a look:

Evading the Google Slap

Update: I take it back. It was a guest post by Jonathan Volk, and that makes more sense. He always posts great content. John Chow apparently still only reviews restaurants.

So I was browsing Google’s massive Adwords tutorials and came upon a feature I had never heard about. I was looking for a way to differentiate content from search clicks in my tracking.

From the Adwords Learning Center:

The ValueTrack tag is a simple tag that you can add to your Destination URLs. It will allow you to distinguish the clicks you receive from search and content sites in the Google Network. It can be used with both keyword-targeted and placement-targeted campaigns. For example, if your URL is www.yoursiteinfo.co.uk, you can use the following tag for your Destination URL:

www.yoursiteinfo.com?type={ifsearch:GoogleAdWordsSearch}{ifcontent:GoogleAdWordsContent}

When using this code, your third party tracking will be able to identify how many of your visitors enter your site via your Google AdWords ad. More importantly, a click on your AdWords ad from Google or a search partner would appear in your weblogs as the following:
www.yoursiteinfo.co.uk?type=GoogleAdWordsSearch

A click from one of our content partners would appear as the following: www.yoursiteinfo.co.uk?type=GoogleAdWordsContent

Nice! So for example, if you’re direct linking a clickbank product, and you want your TID to tell you where the click came from you can make your destination url something like this:

http://affiliate.publisher.hop.clickbank.net/?tid={ifcontent:c}{keyword}

That will append a "c" at the front of your TID for content clicks.