Everyone talks about Google Analytics and its integration with AdWords. Sure, it’s really cool. But what about other CPC systems? People seem to forget that you can track AND import ALL CPC campaigns and cost data in Urchin. Yahoo!, AdWords, MSN… You can import cost data for all these services, that’s a feature that currently isn’t available in GA.
To add cost data to Urchin you must export your cost data from your provider and them import it into Urchin. When you import the data file you must specify the format. By default, Urchin does not have an MSN Ad Center format. Luckily Urchin has a flexible architecture that we can use to almost any log format. So I created an MSN data file format. Using this format you can import your AdWords cost data into Urchin.
There is one problem that I’m still working on. It looks like MSN exports the data file (TSV) in UNICODE format. I _think_ that Urchin is choking on the UNICODE and will only process UTF-8 files. The workaround is to open the export file in Excel and then save it which changes the file to UTF-8 (I think). I’m still looking into this…
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