Using Google Analytics with Adwords
On March 4th 2009 Google updated how Google Analytics imports AdWords data to improve security and provide greater control and convenience. If you’ve not already ‘linked’ your Adwords and Analytics accounts – you should do so to benefit from the additional information that is combined with the regular Adwords data.
Whilst Adwords will provide you with a range or reports relating to the immediate click activity such as word, advert and placement performance, click-through rates, cost-per-click etc. it doesn’t provide information about the subsequent visit to the target website (what happened next). Adwords takes up the baton and provides this information by adding additional metrics as well as combining the core Adwords metrics along with the on-site data.
Linking the two accounts is relatively easy. To do this go to the ‘my account’ tab in Google Adwords and in the ‘Account Preferences’ section, ensure that ‘Auto-Tagging’ is checked. Now click on the ‘Analytics’ tab in Google Adwords and click on ‘Analytics Settings’. Next to your account name, click on the link ‘edit account settings’ and on the following page check the box to ‘Share my Google Analytics data with other Google Products’ (in this case Google Analytics). Your account will now communicate with Google Analytics and share information to enrich Analytics reports’
To view your Adwords data in Google Analytics, click on the ‘Traffic Sources’ tab then ‘Adwords’ option. This will expand to show two further options ‘Adwords Campaigns’ and ‘Keyword Positions’. The keyword position option is very useful at evaluating the most effective advertising positions on a number of user-defined metrics and we covered this in an earlier blog entry Analysing Adwords Positions in Google Analytics.
The Adwords Campaigns tab initially shows the campaigns you have in your Adwords account. The default metrics shown are visits, pages-per-visit, average time-on-site, percentage of new visitors and bounce rate. Note the three tabs above the table containing the campaign names, the default data you are looking at is ‘site usage’. Clicking on the ‘goal conversion’ tab will show you the results for your Analytics defined conversions (not to be confused with Adwords conversions). You will be able to see which campaign drives the best performance on 1-4 goals defined in Analytics as a percentage as well as a per-goal-value if you defined goal values at set-up. Clicking on the ‘clicks tab’ shows you the familiar Adwords metrics such as impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, revenue-per-click and margins if you have this configured in Adwords. You can also assess the hourly breakdown for Goal Conversions such as sales or lead generation (details in our earlier blog entry: Analysing Hourly Traffic and Google Adwords Conversions)
Clicking on a ‘campaign’ will drill down to the ‘ad groups’ within that campaign, showing the same default metrics and again, the goal and click data is available at an ad-group level. Clicking on an ad-group drills down to the individual keywords, again with the default metrics plus goal conversions and click data from Adwords.
As you can see, combining the data from both Google Adwords and Google Analytics provides a very powerful picture of the effectiveness of your PPC activity allowing you to not only determine the most effective words for driving quality traffic to your site, but also for determining which is the optimal position for advertising and the times too.
Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting, integrating with Google Analytics. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.
Tags: Adwords, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Paid Search, PPC