Unlock the Full Potential of your Pay Per Click Ads with Google Analytics

Google Adwords by itself will give you a lot of information about the impressions, click through rate and costs of your Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads.  However, many businesses make the mistake of focusing too much on that information without looking at what else is available.  Linking your AdWords and Analytics accounts opens up a ton of new information on site usage, goal conversion rates and ROI of your ad groups, ads and keywords.  This is a powerful pay per click management tool that can help make sure you get the most out of your ad budget.

 

Linking your AdWords account to your Google Analytics is pretty simple.  Sign into your AdWords account and select the “Reporting and Tools” tab in the top navigation bar.  Select the “Google Analytics” option.  It will give you a choice of either linking to an existing Analytics account or creating a new one.  For help setting up a new account, see this guide.  Once you have set this up, you will be able to easily access one account from the other, and your Google Analytics account will begin providing you with detailed information about when and how visitors from your paid ads interact with your website.  You can find this information under “Traffic Sources” in a tab labeled “AdWords.” 

Now that you’ve linked your accounts, look at your campaign report and click through to “Ad Groups.”  Now you can see not only which of your campaigns brought the most visitors to your site, but how many transactions they led to, how much total revenue they brought in and what the average value of each visit was. You can see when they have completed any goals you have set up on your Analytics account.  You can also find out which keywords and which versions of your ads lead to the most transactions, revenue or goals, as well as what time of day gives you the highest quality traffic.  

 

One of the most useful sections is the ROI report.  You can find this tab on your AdWords “Overview” page.

 

Clicking on this tab opens a report that shows you a daily graph of how your campaigns performed comparing them to the amount of money you spent on the ads.  You can also sort which ad groups and keywords had the highest ROI.

 

All of these can help you target your budget to those ads, keywords, times and days where you’ll get the most benefit from them.  So remember that while clicks and CTR are important, they are only a small part of planning a successful pay per click campaign.