You’ve committed the resources and produced your first Google AdWords campaign. Now it’s time to study the effectiveness of your campaign by utilizing specific Google Analytics reports.
How Do I Track My AdWords Campaigns?
You studied AdWords, composed your advertising copy, allocated funds to your campaign from your advertising and marketing budget, and now you’ve finally launched your first AdWords campaign; now it is important to follow-through and determine what worked and didn’t work with your first campaign. By studying the following Google Analytics reports, you can improve your future AdWord campaigns and subsequently increase your AdWords Quality Score (QS).
AdWords Campaigns Report
The first AdWords-specific report that Google Analytics provides is the “AdWords Campaigns” report. This comprehensive overview focuses on the traffic from your AdWords campaign and three primary advertiser “expectations”: how many visitors clicked-through your ad, sales generated by those visitors, and how many campaign goals are being met. Through this report you can determine if your customers are “bouncing”, or exiting your site directly from your landing page. You can also study the effectiveness of the specific keywords used, the “Matched Search Query”, or full text of Google search queries that resulted in a display of your ad, and even a combination of the two – by combining keywords and Matched Search Queries, you can gain further insight into the effectiveness of the overall performance of your campaign keywords. Finally, this report allows gives you immediate access to the meat and potatoes of your campaign – clicking the “Revenue” heading will sort your keywords by generated revenue.
AdWords Day Parts
The next report is the “AdWords Day Parts” report. This oddly-named report provides campaign statistics based on specific time periods, such as hourly or daily reports based on time zone. This report allows you to study the effectiveness of your campaign at very specific times of the day in certain regions, thereby helping you determine if your ads would be more effective if limited to certain time periods. For example, an AdWords campaign by a casual dining restaurant featuring a newly-expanded lunch menu might by most effective immediately before and during the traditional daily lunch period, while a campaign by a business looking to attract weekend visitors, such as an amusement park or golf course, may find ads displayed on a Thursday or Friday more effective than ads displayed earlier in the week.
AdWords Destination URLs
The “AdWords Destination URLs” report provides more detail about the specific URLs used to direct click-through visitors to your site. This report is an exclusive “landing-page report” for your AdWords traffic. Next, the “AdWords Placement” report compares placements on the Google Display Network, which features AdWords ads on sites outside of Google-owned properties. These include your automatic and managed placements on the network and the domains and specific URLS where your ad is placed. This report will allow you to determine if managed placements, which are placements specifically chosen by the advertiser, are more or less effective than automatic placements, which are placements chosen by Google.
AdWord Bid Adjustments
The last two reports include detailed studies of both keywords positioning and AdWords bid adjustments. If your AdWords campaign simply did not perform as well as you anticipated, these reports will assist you in determining if you need to budget a higher investment in your AdWords campaign, and if adjustments to your existing bid parameters are necessary to improve the performance of your campaign.