The payoff for learning three of Google's most popular and successful programs is finally here! You've read through 13 chapters covering everything you need to know (and then some) about Google AdWords, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer. For the next few chapters I'll write about using the combined power of these products for your continued success in all things online.
The first of the three chapters in this part of Your Google Game Plan for Success talks about using Google AdWords and Google Analytics together. Luckily, Google makes this easy for advertisers by allowing you to use them in tandem — you can log in to Google Analytics and find your AdWords data, which you can analyze and extract insights from. This functionality is unique in the advertising industry, and it's the fulcrum of this particular chapter. I'll also talk about Search Funnels, a Google Analytics style report available in Google AdWords, and about how to import your goals from Google Analytics into Google AdWords.
Let's start by making sure that your AdWords data is being imported into your Google Analytics account.
As I mentioned in the opening of this chapter, the ability to directly import your online marketing statistics into a web-analytics program is something unique in the industry. Some web-analytics vendors allow you to upload a tab-separated file or a spreadsheet that you first download from Yahoo! Search Marketing or another pay-per-click platform. This is a manual process that you must do on your own to ensure that your platform's cost data can appear in your web-analytics program. Sometimes this imported data is not segmentable — it can be viewed in the interface only as it was uploaded from your downloaded spreadsheet.
Because syncing between Google AdWords and Google Analytics is possible, none of that business is necessary. Within three simple steps your AdWords data, such as clicks, impressions, and click-through rates, will be imported into a subsection of the Traffic Sources section specifically reserved for Google AdWords. To much jubilation within the industry, this section was recently redesigned and is now more powerful than ever before. There are new segmentation options, views, and reports, which I'll walk you through in this chapter.
First let's get you synced up. Follow the next three steps, and you'll be on your way to combining the power of Google AdWords and the power of Google Analytics.
The only prerequisite for syncing your AdWords data and your Analytics data is that your log-in e-mail address must be an administrator on both your Google Analytics account and your Google AdWords account.
If you are an administrator on both accounts, great! You are in a very small minority, and you can move on to Step 2. For most of you, keep on reading.
For Google Analytics the process of becoming an administrator is very easy. If you are not one already, please alert the person who gave you access to your Google Analytics account. Ask this person to log in and click User Manager from the account overview screen, and then point him or her to Figure 14-1. Make sure your access is changed from View Reports Only to Account Administrator, as shown in Figure 14-1.
Remember that account administrators are able to do everything that can be done within a Google Analytics account. This includes creating and deleting profiles, editing settings, and adding or removing users.
For Google AdWords the process is a little bit stickier, because there are a few extra steps involved. First of all, please note that any e-mail address can have access to only one AdWords account at a time. If for whatever reason your e-mail address has access to another Google AdWords account that you're not going to sync, please ask another AdWords administrator to terminate your access. The administrator can do so by logging in to AdWords, clicking the My Account tab, and clicking within the Account Access link. From there the other administrator will need to find your e-mail address and select Terminate Access from the Actions drop-down menu.
If you are the only person who has access to the Google AdWords account (if you created the account), you will actually need to cancel it using the Preferences link in the My Account tab. You may need to contact an AdWords representative if you're one of those rare individuals who have created an accidental AdWords account, or who still have access to an older (inactive) AdWords account.
Let's assume for the moment that you don't have issues with AdWords. Chances are actually pretty good that you'll have administrative access to your AdWords account. If you don't have any access or you have a different access level, please contact your AdWords account administrator — the only person who can help you switch your access level to Administrator, or assign you any access at all (see Figure 14-2). If you need access (i.e., you don't have access currently), you will need to be invited to the AdWords account by your account's administrator. Then you'll exchange a few e-mails, generated by Google, with your account's administrator, who will help you receive access to your account.
Remember, the e-mail address through which you have administrative access to a Google Analytics account must be the same one that gives you access to a Google AdWords account. If you're having issues with your account administrator, and for whatever reason this person cannot give you administrative access to either account, there's always the option of using a different e-mail account (controlled by your administrator) to get the AdWords and Analytics accounts synced. Your personal e-mail address doesn't have to be the one that has administrator standing in both accounts — as long as there is one e-mail address that is in both accounts, you can begin the process of syncing the accounts.
Assuming the worst is over and you have administrative access to both accounts, you can now actually start syncing them. The first thing you'll need to do is enable destination URL auto-tagging on your AdWords account. You can do this via the My Account tab by clicking the Preferences link. A checkbox will enable you to turn on auto-tagging, as shown at the bottom of Figure 14-3. You'll want to ensure that this option is checked.
Destination URL auto-tagging appends a gclid query string parameter at the end of the destination URLs used on your AdWords ads and keywords. Once you apply this function, perform a test click on one of your ads, and you'll see something like the following example:
http://www.zwee.com/apple/cheap-ipod-nano-4th-gen/?gclid=CIH1- bOv_KECFQ0hnAodsgInDg
That string of encoded characters at the end of the destination URL sends the referral information, such as the keyword, ad group, campaign, and landing page, to Google Analytics.
Once your destination URL auto-tagging is applied, you can now sync the accounts together. Click the Reporting tab and then the Google Analytics link. Doing so will bring you to a screen that looks like Figure 14-4. Since I'm working under the assumption that you already have a Google Analytics account, you'll want to click the second radio button and then click Continue. But if you wanted to, you could create a Google Analytics account from right here.
The next screen that you'll see will look like Figure 14-5. Here you should see your Google Analytics account in the drop-down menu (if you have administrative access to multiple Google Analytics accounts, they should all be listed here). Ensure that the desired Google Analytics account is selected. In case you missed Step 2 (destination URL auto-tagging), you're again reminded of it here with a checkbox.
When you're finished, click Link My Account, and the sync is completed!
You can verify that this sync has been properly created, and that AdWords data is being received by your Google Analytics account, by clicking within the main website profile information of your Google Analytics profile. Now you'll see a new checkbox, under the new subheading Apply Cost Data, which will show your AdWords account ID as in Figure 14-6.
Now that you're synced you'll start to see your AdWords data appear in Google Analytics within a new AdWords report subsection, found at the very bottom of the Traffic Sources report section in Google Analytics. I've been saving this report section from all the way back in Chapter 7 until this point in the book. This newer section of reports in Google Analytics features eight reports, a unique set of tabs, metrics, and dimensions, and a dozen new segmenting options that are available only in this subsection.
Before you start diving in, please note that AdWords data is not processed the same way as Google Analytics data. Every day, sometime in the wee hours of the morning, Google Analytics will pull in the previous day's AdWords data in one lump and process the data into the AdWords subsection of reports. If you synced your accounts on May 25, for example, you most likely won't see any AdWords data until May 27, and at that point you'll see only the data from May 26 (the previous day). Google Analytics cannot import AdWords data from before you synced the accounts. You also can't edit AdWords bid prices or ad copy from Google Analytics (sorry!). You'll still have to use Google AdWords for that. But now that you're all synced up, you can access either program at any time by first logging in to AdWords and then using the Reports tab to access Google Analytics. No longer will you have to switch tabs or browser windows to access either program.
Within the new AdWords report subsection you'll be able to segment your data using some new segmentation options that were previously available only in AdWords. These are available from any of the standard first- or second-dimension drop-down menus within the standard report tables. You'll see them in the first group of segments in either of the two drop-down menus.
Within any report in the new AdWords subsection, look at the reporting table in the middle of the page. Below the scorecard (the row of metrics in a bigger font, directly underneath the report tabs), you should see two drop-down menus. These drop-down menus are where you'll be able to utilize the new AdWords segmentation options. The first four new segments — Campaign, Ad Group, Keyword, and Ad Content — are already familiar to you, as they are available throughout Google Analytics. The other segmentation options currently available are:
Ad Distribution Network: These are the networks where your ads are being shown. You know them as Google Search, Google Search Partners, and the Content Network. Now you get the evidence that you've desperately needed to evaluate which networks are doing the best job of matching your advertising goals.
Match Type: One of my favorite new options, this segments keywords, ad groups, and campaigns (or any report) by keyword match types, which are broad, phrase, and exact match. Google Analytics makes it very easy to discover which match type performs best in terms of conversion rate or e-commerce.
Matched Search Query: An interesting and insightful segment, the Matched Search Query allows you to see what a searcher actually typed into Google to bring up your ad. Remember that while you may be bidding for certain keywords of the broad or even phrase-match type, a user may actually type in something different to bring up your ad. This segment can put the spotlight on new keyword-bidding opportunities.
Placement Domain: Are you advertising in the Google Content Network? Would you like to see which website domains are actually showing your ads and how each individual domain performs? Find your desired Content Network campaign and use this segment to view not only how much traffic each domain is bringing to you, but also how many conversions or how much revenue it is responsible for.
Placement URL: Much like the Placement Domain segment, the Placement URL segment shows you the full destination URL path of the page on which your Content Network ads are appearing. Use these URLs to view the specific pages on which your ads appear. As a good practice with AdWords (also discussed earlier in the book), you should go as far as copying the placement URL and visiting it for yourself, so that you can see where your ad is appearing and how it looks.
Ad Format: Google AdWords allows advertisers to run text, image, video, and rich media ads. In the new AdWords subsection of reports you can segment by ad format and compare performance across campaigns, ad groups, and even ad formats.
Targeting Type: This segment allows you to see the targeting type for your campaigns. You'll usually see either keyword or site targeting, as these are the options that advertisers use in AdWords.
Display URL: Your display URL is an important part of your AdWords ad, and it now can be segmented within Google Analytics. Using multiple display URLs across your ad groups? Compare their performances by segmenting by display URL, and make appropriate changes to your campaigns afterward.
Destination URL: One of the big factors determining keyword Quality Score and campaign performance is the destination URL (landing page) of your ads. With this final segment, view the full destination URLs as you typed them into your AdWords campaigns, and view traffic and performance data for each individual one. This is one way of analyzing the performance between two landing pages in a poor man's A/B experiment, without using Google Website Optimizer.
As I walk you through the reports in this section I'll make use of some screenshots that will show some of these new segments in action.
When you access the AdWords subsection from within the Traffic Sources section of reports, the default report that you will see is AdWords Overview. This screen provides you with an overview of what your AdWords campaigns are doing and how they're performing.
Let's examine Figure 14-7 to get a sense of the type of data you'll see in this section. First, the trending graph at the very top of the report defaults to comparing two very important metrics: click-through rate (abbreviated CTR, as you know) and bounce rate. As you can see just by looking at the trending graph, when the click-through rate peaked at the end of April, the bounce rate decreased, and after that surge in click-through rate, in early May, the bounce rate increased again. You haven't even really seen anything in this section, and already you are receiving valuable information about your AdWords account.
Below the trending graph you'll see a potpourri of metrics from AdWords and Analytics combined. You can see the number of visits, clicks, and impressions that AdWords generated, as well as the number of goal completions, the revenue (for e-commerce sites or goals with goal values enabled), and an ROI (return-on-investment) metric that is available only in this subsection (you can't even get it in AdWords). Toward the very bottom of the overview screen you'll see your top five AdWords account assets (campaigns and keywords) sorted by visits but displaying goal completions for each one.
This overview section represents a shift in philosophy from what you're accustomed to seeing throughout Google Analytics. The focus is clearly on providing insights and showing you performance-oriented metrics, and not so much on displaying raw visits and statistics in aggregate.
As with any report in Google Analytics, the AdWords Overview screen can be added to your dashboard, e-mailed to a colleague, or viewed under an Advanced Segment.
The second report in the AdWords subsection is the Campaigns report. Here you'll find a Site Usage tab, but with slightly different metrics on the scorecard. An example of the Campaigns report is shown in Figure 14-8.
Here I'm using the secondary dimension of Ad Distribution Network so that I can see which campaigns correspond to which distribution networks. My job as an analyst and an online marketer would be to see which networks are providing me with the best ROI and conversion-rate figures (or are matching up to my advertising goals the best).
But the Site Usage tab isn't the best feature of this report. There is a fourth tab on the top of this report, called Clicks, which holds all your AdWords data. This can be seen in Figure 14-9. This tab shows AdWords metrics, but also includes metrics like ROI and RPC (revenue per click) that are not available in AdWords.
The Clicks tab is also available in the next report section, which is the Keywords report.
The next report in this subsection is the Keywords report, which is a virtual carbon copy of the Campaigns report. Each of the keywords that you're bidding for is listed here, and all the tabs available in the Campaigns report are also here.
Figure 14-10 shows the Keywords report, and shows another good example of using secondary dimensions to view the new segmentation options from the AdWords section. In Figure 14-10, I am using the Match Type segment to view performance-based metrics for the keywords in my campaigns. Because I'm bidding on different match types for the same keyword in AdWords, I can break the keywords down in this report with the Match Type segment.
The Day Parts report shows you two interesting pieces of information from your AdWords account. In Figure 14-11 you can see toward the top of the screen that the trending graph shows you data plotted by the day of the week. I've enabled two metrics to show the correlation between the visits that each day of the week receives and the e-commerce conversion rate.
The other piece of data, the hour of the day, appears as dimensions going down the report table. Because I'm looking at the E-commerce tab and I'm sorting my data by revenue, the highest-revenue hours are shown (by default, this report is listed starting with 00:00 and ending with 23:00). I've also decided to compare this report's e-commerce conversion rate to the site average. Interestingly, only three of the top 10 revenue-generating hours yield an e-commerce conversion rate higher than the site average.
The Destination URLs report shown in Figure 14-12 shows you the actual destination URLs (landing pages) that you are using in your AdWords account. This is very similar to the Landing Pages report in the Content section, only you're looking at the URLs that you use in AdWords.
Figure 14-12 shows the Destination URLs report segmented by the targeting type, which is either keyword targeting or site targeting. Since I'm using both in different campaigns in my AdWords account, I can see listings for both when I perform a segment.
The Placements report shows you the difference in performance between your managed Content Network placements and your automatic Content Network placements. This is a good way to analyze your content campaigns, but when you click either Managed or Automatic (depending upon which placement types you're running in AdWords), you'll be able to drill down to view the actual placement domains that are being advertised on. Clicking a placement domain will show you the placement URL (the URL of the page your ad is actually appearing on).
Of course, if you are not advertising in the Content Network, nothing will appear in this report.
This is one of the more interesting reports of the entire AdWords section. Here you can view keyword performance per ad position on www.google.com. When you click a keyword, as I've done in Figure 14-13, you can view how many visits you've received from each of the standard positions in which your ads appear on a search engine results page. You can change the Position Breakdown drop-down menu to view other metrics, such as revenue, bounce rate, and goal-conversion rate.
The final report in the AdWords subsection imports your TV ads data from your Google AdWords account. If you are one of the few advertisers running TV ads through AdWords, you'll be able to view metrics such as TV impressions, ad plays, initial audience reach, and the total cost of your campaigns.
You can use this report to compare your site metrics to your TV ad campaigns and to determine the effectiveness of your TV ads.
There are some other ways that you can use the power of both programs outside the AdWords subsection of reports. There are a few reports within Google AdWords that will be interesting to you, such as the Search Funnels report, which is not available in Google Analytics at the time of this writing. I'll close out this chapter with some of the other things that you can do to harness the power of both Google AdWords and Google Analytics.
One of the things that you can do when synced is to import your goals into your AdWords account. Instead of having to create conversion tracking actions as shown in earlier chapters of this book, you can simply import the goals that you create in your Google Analytics profile directly to AdWords.
When you click the Reporting tab within your AdWords account you'll see a Conversions link, which is where you'll be able to find the conversion actions and code associated with conversion tracking. But this time you'll also notice a silver Import from Google Analytics button toward the top of the Conversions sub-tab table. Click this button, and you'll see all the goals that you've set up. If any of the goals have received any conversions within the last 30 days, you'll be able to import them into this report section. You can then return to the Conversions report and see Google Analytics goals listed within your Google AdWords account.
Please note a few things before importing your goals. First, you must have benchmarking (data sharing) enabled in your Google Analytics account to be allowed to import your goals into AdWords. Then you'll need to have "active" goals (goals that have received conversions sometime within the last 30 days). Finally, you should know that importing your goals from Google Analytics does not replace, deactivate, or change any actions that you have taken with the Google AdWords conversion tracking tool. That piece of JavaScript code will always operate independently from your Google Analytics goals. In the Campaigns report within AdWords you won't see your Google Analytics goal data (it won't be duplicated within AdWords if one of your imported goals happens to be a page where you also have AdWords conversion tracking installed).
Within the Conversions section of your AdWords account you should notice a link on the left-hand side of the screen pointing you to a new report section, avail-able only in AdWords, called the Search Funnels report. This report highlights the keywords and keyword paths that assist other keywords to get conversions.
What this means is that AdWords is able to determine which search terms help the keywords that get credited with the conversion in AdWords and Analytics reports. This allows advertisers to shift their focus from paying attention to and spending money on only those keywords that get credited for conversions, and to focus also on other keywords that assisted in the conversion process. Figure 14-14 shows the Search Funnels Overview screen, which looks a lot like a Google Analytics report.
In the overview shown in Figure 14-14, the total number of conversions is shown, as well as some averages, such as days, clicks, and impressions to conversion. Below these data are the top conversion actions (these can be both AdWords and Google Analytics goals), and to the right are some helpful links to reports within the Search Funnels section.
This report section features a report showing top conversions and a report highlighting the campaigns, ad groups, or keywords that received assisted clicks and impressions, as well as reports showing first- and last-click analyses, time lag, and path length. There is also a Top Paths report, showing you the keywords that assisted the converting keyword.
The only unfortunate thing about the Search Funnels section is that space doesn't permit a thorough explanation of this very interesting and insightful new section of reports in AdWords. Make sure your account is synced and make sure that you use this report section to uncover nuggets of information that can help you allocate more of your marketing dollars to the keywords that help your conversion process.
You may be working with another individual or organization that is running AdWords ads for the same client as you. This means that two active AdWords accounts are running simultaneously for the same client, and only one of these accounts is synced and sending data to your Google Analytics account.
You have two options at this point — it's critical that your AdWords account data is being imported into your Google Analytics account. First, you can contact a Google representative, if you have one. There are some links within your AdWords account that allow you to contact Google via e-mail or a form that's provided. Your second option is to reach out to a Google Analytics Certified Partner, like the company that I work for at the time of this writing. It may be able to assist you in getting your multiple AdWords accounts synced and sending cost data to your Google Analytics account.