The Perfect Partnership – Analytics and AdWords

Now that you have set up your AdWords Account and have traffic going to your website, it is important that you know what all these people are doing on your website. That’s where Google Analytics can help you.

Analytics can separate the traffic you are paying to visit your site from the remainder of your traffic, allowing you to see if your advertising budget is converting to profit.

Under the Reporting tab in AdWords you will find the link to Google Analytics and follow the instructions on how to set up an Analytics Account and implementing the Google Analytics Tracking Code on your website. To check to see if you have correctly implemented the code, see our previous post on Implementing Google Analytics.

You don’t need to worry about adding tracking to the AdWords destination URLs as Google will do this automatically as long as you have auto tracking enabled in your AdWords Account

To check this:

1. Navigate to the My Account tab in AdWords
2. Account Preferences
3. Check that in the Tracking section Auto-tagging reads Yes. If this says No then select Edit and change to Yes.

Now that this is set up correctly you should be able to review the AdWords traffic in your Analytics Account.

Traffic Sources Report

The simplest report is the Top Traffic Sources report which will list the Source and Medium of all the traffic to your site. This will allow you to compare traffic levels over various time frames and the data can be displayed in tables or a graph format.

AdWords Campaigns Report

Within the Traffic Source collection of reports there are also AdWords reports. In these all your Campaigns will be populated with the number of Clicks which have been delivered. If you have Goals or E-commerce tracking set up, these will also report the ROI and the value of any transactions right down to keyword level.

Keyword Position Report

Once your AdWords Account becomes stable, is accumulating data and all your goals have been  set up, create a Keyword Position Report to see which position in Sponsored Links proves to be most effective for your ads.

The information can then be used to enable Position Preference within your AdWords Account. For example, if a keyword converts better in position three, rather than position one or two and your average position in the search results is one. Then it could be more effective for the ad to show lower down in position three or set a variable like between two and four. Google doesn’t guarantee that your ad will always show in the position you requested.

Rather than competing for top spot all the time you might find that ads deliver better conversions in a lower position which may result in a lower Cost per Click (CPC).

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