Make better decisions in AdWords with your Google Analytics data

A version of the following post originally appeared on the Inside AdWords Blog.

Google Analytics users already know how useful it is to analyze advertising and web data together. Now we’re making it possible to use your Google Analytics data right in AdWords. After setting up AdWords to import your Google Analytics data, you’ll have access to key metrics like Bounce Rate, Pages Per Visit, and Average Visit Duration directly in the AdWords interface. With more performance data available right where you’re managing your campaigns, you can make better informed decisions and improve your AdWords ROI.

Using your Google Analytics data
With Google Analytics you can find insights that matter, including how visitors arrive at your website, how they use it, and how you can keep them coming back. Here are some ways you can take advantage of the new Google Analytics data available in AdWords to improve your results.

• Attract more engaged users. If highly engaged users are an important goal, sort your ad groups to find the ones that deliver visitors who stay on your site the longest (“Average Visit Duration” or “Pages Per Visit”), and bid more for these.
• Discover opportunities to convert more engaged visitors. You might find certain keywords or ads that have relatively low conversion rates, but great engagement metrics. You could lower your bids by a little and move on. Or you could see this as a great opportunity to convert clearly engaged visitors into buyers. By adjusting your offer, adding an incentive (like a coupon or discount code), or making your call to action more obvious and accessible, you might be able to improve your ROI and your conversion volume. To look for these types of opportunities, create a filter based on conversion rate and sort by Average Visit Duration, Pages per visit, or Bounce Rate.
• Identify ads with badly matched landing pages or inaccurate targeting. Pages with both low conversion rates and low engagement metrics (low Average Visit Duration or High Bounce Rate) could indicate a poor landing page for a particular ad or keyword. It might also suggest inaccurate targeting. To identify and troubleshoot these problems, set up a filter for low conversion rate and low engagement rate and regularly monitor it. Since you’re using Google Analytics, you can easily set up A/B testing on the landing page using a Content Experiment.

Success in action

Casamundo, the biggest vacation rental listing service in Europe, has been an early tester of this new feature. They've used Google Analytics since 2008 and over the past 5 years they've grown and refined their AdWords campaigns to over 50 million active keywords across 10 languages. Their analysis shows that converting visitors research vacation rentals over an average of 7.4 visits, so understanding whether their ads and keywords can create strong engagement is vital to their business and how they optimize their AdWords campaigns. Seeing high bounce rates and low average time on site for a keyword means that the offer or destination page might not be a good match for that keyword.

Having easier access to Google Analytics data right in AdWords has helped Torge Kahl, Online Marketing Manager, at Casamundo make better decisions and make optimizations more quickly. According to Torge: 

“The combination of using both Google AdWords and Google Analytics has proved to be the perfect set of tools for us to achieve our goals, and we're very happy to see this combination get more integrated and powerful. Using Analytics data right within AdWords has let me better optimize our account and significantly improve the return on our AdWords investment."

More details

Please visit the AdWords Help Center for step-by-step directions on how to connect your Google Analytics profile data to your AdWords account and for more details. 

To exchange tips and ask questions of others, please visit the AdWords community. You can always contact AdWords support for help if you need it.

Posted by Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

You can now see mobile ad performance in Google Analytics.

Starting this week, some of you will see enhanced Analytics reports with mobile ad performance metrics. All AdWords reports in the new interface will be gaining a new visual toggle as shown below for “All”, “High-end Mobile” and “Tablet” ads.  All AdWords metrics available in Google Analytics can be segmented by these new mobile and tablet dimensions.

 

As more consumers begin to make use of tablets or high-end mobile devices, businesses need to understand this shift towards mobile and adapt your marketing mix. This mobile ads reporting enhancement in Google Analytics is one of many steps that we are taking towards helping you make more sense of how mobile advertising interacts with your business.

Please let us know what you think, and suggest any other mobile measurement options you’d like to see that help make sense of your mobile advertising effectiveness.

- Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

Linking all of your AdWords accounts to Google Analytics

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, Gavin Doolan, an Analytics specialist shares some of improvements to AdWords linking in Google Analytics v5.

We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to use multiple AdWords accounts with Google Analytics more effectively.

Previously it was only possible to link a single AdWords account to a single Google Analytics account. This made it more challenging to use auto-tagging and the AdWords reports inside of Google Analytics.

Starting today, you can now link multiple AdWords accounts to your Google Analytics account. The new data sources section in the Google Analytics account settings area makes it easy to use auto-tagging with multiple AdWords accounts and import your AdWords data into Google Analytics.

Let’s take a look at how to set this up:

Before you start, make sure that you're using a Google account that has access to both your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, and is an Administrator for the Analytics account.

If you want to link multiple AdWords accounts to a single Analytics account, you need to set the new version of Analytics as your default:

1. Sign into Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics.

2. Click New Version at the top right of the page.

3. Click Make this version default.

If you skip this step, you won’t see the new linking interface when you sign into AdWords.

Linking your accounts

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.

2. Click the Reporting and Tools tab, then click Google Analytics.

3. Click the gear icon at the top right.

4. Click All Accounts at the top left of the page.

5. Click the account to which you want to link the AdWords account.

6. Click the Data Sources tab.

7. Click the AdWords tab.

8. Click Link Accounts button.

If you are linking from a My Client Center child account the process is very similar. You can more in this article: Linking Analytics Accounts to My Client Center (MCC) Accounts.

Improvements to applying AdWords account data to multiple profiles

Now that you can link multiple AdWords accounts to Google Analytics, we’ve also made it easier import your AdWords data into multiple profiles in Google Analytics. We have put together a quick video demonstrating how to do this:

If you’re less of a visual learner, you can always find instructions on how to link accounts in the Google Analytics Help Center.

Happy linking!

Gavin Doolan

Google Analytics Team

Launch: Intelligence Just Got Smarter!

Hopefully, by now, you’re making good use of the Intelligence report in Google Analytics. If you’re looking to avoid the feeling that Google Analytics is “puking” too much data at you - a phrase coined by Google’s beloved analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik - you're not alone. We've heard you, and Intelligence is your first stop. As we mentioned in a previous post introducing Intelligence, it’s your dedicated assistant, monitoring your website traffic for significant changes that you should know of. Wondering what’s going on under the hood of your site traffic? Intelligence will tell you.

And it’s improving and getting smarter. Here are two improvements we’re announcing today.

New! AdWords Alerts

If you have linked your Google Analytics account with an AdWords account, Intelligence will now automatically surface important changes in your AdWords campaigns performance right in Google Analytics. So, in addition to the alerts you are used to getting, such as time on site and revenue, you’ll now receive alerts about your AdWords campaigns and the traffic they are bringing to your website.

You might already be familiar with custom alerts in Google AdWords, which alert you when important changes you specify happen in your account. With AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence, you benefit from automatic detection of significant changes, with no extra work for you to configure these yourself. For example, you might see an alert if the CTR for one of your campaigns increased unexpectedly. Or you might find that revenue from one of your destination URLs has dropped significantly from the week before. In both cases, you didn’t need to know ahead of time what to look for. These important changes are automatically detected and brought to your attention.

Here's how to use them. AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence work just like automatic alerts have in the past. You can learn more about how to use Analytics Intelligence here: http://www.google.com/analytics/analytics-intelligence.html.

In order to use AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence, you need to have a linked AdWords account. Additionally, you need to have destination URL auto-tagging turned on. If you already use the AdWords reports in Analytics, you’re all set.

1. Sign into your Analytics account

2. Select Intelligence from the left-hand navigation

3. Choose daily (default), weekly, or monthly alerts

Directly underneath the graph, you’ll see check boxes for Custom Alerts, Web Analytics, and AdWords, which is next to the orange arrow in image above.

If you want to focus solely on your AdWords alerts, you can uncheck Custom Alerts and Web Analytics. Then, you can adjust the sensitivity slider to see just the most significant alerts or create an advanced segment to more closely investigate the change.

New #2! More options in Custom Alerts

It always easy to create a custom alert if there is a metric you’d like Intelligence to specifically monitor. See the orange arrow again, below:

You name the alert, apply it to a profile, designate a time period, and then set conditions for the visitor (such as City matches New York, or Campaign matches Fall Sale), and the metric (such as time on site greater than 5 minutes, or % of new visits is greater than 30%).

And now, we’ve added a ton more options in the Alert Conditions drop downs, including all of the 20 goals you have configured in each profile. They’ve also been dressed up for a night on the town, wearing their actual goal names such as “Goal8 Value: Visited >10 pages.” Only goals that you have configured will show up in the list, keeping the drop-down menu clean and courteous.

Among the other conditions and metrics now available: e-commerce and AdWords metrics, as well as more traffic sources, and more content page metrics. And remember, you can tell Intelligence to email you when an alert is triggered.

Intelligence is getting smarter and smarter, making you more effective. Try it out if you haven’t already.

Posted by Beth Liebert and Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

The New AdWords Reports in Google Analytics

Last month, we made a number of announcements around the Google Analytics ecosystem. Along with launching the Google Analytics Application Gallery and making the new, faster page tag the default, we released a major update of the AdWords reports in Google Analytics. As of today, all Analytics users now have access to the new AdWords reports. With this update, you have access to three new reports, 10 new dimensions, and more AdWords metrics.

Three Brand New Reports

Three new reports give you the ability to dig into all aspects of your AdWords campaign performance. Click any photo to enlarge.

Day Parts Report

Curious to know the best day of the week for your ads or the best hours of the day for your campaigns? See your ad performance broken down by day of the week and by hour of the day using the Day Parts report. The Day Parts report can help you find the most profitable times of day for your ads. Then pair it with the Ad Scheduling feature in AdWords to automatically adjust your bid to capture the right traffic at the right time.

Destination URLs Report

What are your best landing pages? The Destination URLs report lets you dive into the performance of each of your Destination URLs. You can break out performance at the Campaign, Ad Group, or Keyword level. Apply a secondary dimension like Keywords and see your top Destination URL/Keyword pairs.

Placements Report

The Placement Performance Report in AdWords shows you the performance of your ads on the Google Content Network. With the Placements Report in Google Analytics, you can get rich post-click performance data about your campaigns and find the best sites to target your ads. Or, either exclude the sites that don’t send you engaged traffic or identify the top performers to create a targeted display campaign.

10 New AdWords Dimensions

Dive deep into your AdWords performance using 10 new AdWords dimensions. For example, try Match Type to see performance between Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match. Love the search query report in AdWords? Segment by Matched Search Query to see exact user queries that triggered your ads and post-click performance.

Clicks Tab in Campaigns and Keywords reports

The Clicks tab brings your AdWords performance metrics into Google Analytics. From the Clicks tab you can get an overview of AdWords performance at the Campaign, Ad Group, or Keyword level. Combined with Goals or eCommerce tracking you can see a complete picture of your AdWords performance.

How to Get Started with the New AdWords Reports

To start using the new AdWords reports in Google Analytics you need a linked AdWords account. You also need to make sure that Destination URL auto-tagging is turned on. Start from your AdWords account, select the Reporting tab, then Google Analytics. To access the reports from Google Analytics, select Traffic Sources, then AdWords.

You can see the new reports in action in this video:

Hope you enjoy the new reports! Let us know what you think in the comments.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

The Growing Google Analytics Ecosystem

Google Analytics is not simply a product but also a growing ecosystem of developers, tools, users, and partners. Today at the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, Brett Crosby made several announcements that highlight this ecosystem.

All Google Analytics customers have access to a worldwide network of Google Certified Partners (formerly known as Google Analytics Authorized Consultants). And now the ecosystem is growing further with developers who are creating a variety of applications on the Google Analytics platform. Today, we’re announcing the Google Analytics App Gallery. Among the current list of 32 apps, you’ll find tools like Excellent Analytics, which lets you work with your Analytics data in an Excel spreadsheet, and the Analyticator for Wordpress, which automatically implements Google Analytics across your entire WordPress site. There are many more applications in the gallery, so go take a look. And if you’re a developer, you can learn how to publish apps in the App Gallery here.

Google AdWords is another important part of the ecosystem. Website owners drive traffic using AdWords, and use Google Analytics to understand the performance of that traffic. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics. These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account. For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs. For a 3-minute overview of what you can accomplish with the new reports, check out this video.

Also, developers can now access AdWords information via the Google Analytics APIs. This makes it much easier to combine your AdWords and Google Analytics data for both analysis and automation. We’re very excited to see third party applications that use this capability to offer new functionality to advertisers. For details, check out this article, which includes a code sample and more, on Google Code.

Also part of the AdWords/Analytics ecosystem, AdWords Search Funnels was announced one month ago, and today is available in all AdWords accounts. We’re also making two short tips videos available (tip 1 and tip 2) that illustrate just a couple of the ways you can use Search Funnels.

Finally, supporting the ecosystem of all websites using Google Analytics, the new faster page tag comes out of beta. The asynchronous tracking snippet will soon be the default snippet when you set up a new profile. This new page tag will speed up your site and every site that uses Google Analytics across the web. If you want to upgrade from your existing tag (which we highly recommend), you can learn how to do that here.

We'll follow up with deep dive posts on each of these topics next week. Thanks for being part of the ecosystem.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Tips and Tools for Expanding Keywords Lists

You can use Google Analytics to find the best keywords and shift budget to the highest converting keywords, but what if you're looking to expand your keyword lists? In this post, we are going to look at how you can leverage other free Google tools to optimize your marketing campaigns beyond Google Analytics.

1) Take a look at the best performing keywords from your Google Analytics Keyword Report.

2) Input these keywords, along with your site's URL, into the Search-based Keyword Tool to find keywords not currently in your AdWords campaign. Suggestions from this tool are particularly useful because they're specific to the site and keywords you define, and are based on actual, past Google queries.

3) For each keyword identified, you can then use Google Insights for Search -- a tool that allows you to see trends in what the world is searching for -- to see where regional interest is highest and better optimize through geotargeting.

You can also enter your top-performing keywords from Google Analytics directly into Google Insights for Search to identify the top-related and rising searches. This can help you expand your keyword lists and keep them current by staying abreast of related search trends.

These are just a few examples of how you can capitalize on the many Google tools available for improving your website ROI, so start expanding and optimizing your possibilities today!

Posted by Lauren Usui, Insights for Search Team

Analytics, AdWords, and Big Spenders

In the spirit of the holidays, we would like to offer tips on how to increase visibility into your e-commerce performance and your advertising spend using Google Analytics. For many, seasonality influences purchasing decisions and affects business revenues. Analytics can help keep a close eye on your advertising spend and e-commerce trends to run a cost conscious business.

We recommend 3 simple methods captured in the videos below. You can find these videos and more on the new Google Analytics Youtube Channel.

1. Use Google Analytics to track your e-commerce activity. As an e-commerce site, you likely want to know who is visiting your site and the goods they are purchasing. By enabling E-commerce tracking on your site, Google Analytics will provide vital metrics including overall revenue, revenue per product, average transaction amount, and more.

Coupled with our Motion Charts feature, you can easily see how the the products trend over time by various dimensions including: revenue, quantity, and average price.

2. Identify your high spenders to better target your website promotions and ad spend. With additional information on ROI for keywords and spending trends, you can focus your efforts on the traffic you care about the most.

3. Link your AdWords and Analytics accounts to track ROI, Revenue per Click, campaign and keywords performance. Added benefits include drilling down to the ad campaign, ad group, and keyword levels for goals conversions and e-commerce transactions.

And don't forget, even a few minutes a day with Google Analytics can help your website.

Posted by Melissa Hsieh, Google Analytics Team

How do I actually use Analytics to optimize AdWords?

Google Analytics is full of insights that can benefit your AdWords account, and your business. To help you make the most of this information, we've started an introductory video series called “Google Analytics in 60 Seconds.” The first two videos explain two easy ways to refine your targeting. You can find them below and as part of the Google Analytics Conversion University playlist.

Location, Location, Location
Now, you no longer are flying blind when you target your campaign by location in AdWords. Use the Map Overlay report and location data within Analytics to see, geographically, where your visitors are coming from – or where they aren’t coming from. You can then use this information to refine your AdWords marketing with location-targeted campaigns to build your business.




Note: You can also use the recently launched Geographic Performance report within AdWords to see similar information, but it currently does not have a visual component nor includes some of the metrics available in Analytics, such as time on site and bounce rate.


Improve Your Placement Targeting
The Google content network is the largest contextual advertising network in the world, comprised of high-quality websites, news pages, and blogs that partner with Google to display targeted AdWords ads. And within AdWords, you can hand-pick which sites you'd like your ads to run on by creating a placement-targeted campaign. But how do you know which sites to pick? If you knew which sites were already sending you high value traffic, why not run your ads on these sites? This video will show you how to use Google Analytics to identify the best sites by using the Referring Sites report.




More to come!
There are a number of easy and effective ways to use Google Analytics with AdWords – whether you want to identify the best keywords, save money on bidding, expand your business or refine your campaigns – and we’ll post more of these videos soon!

Posted by Stephanie Hsu, Google Analytics Team

Practitioner Post: Adwords Auto-Tagging and URL Redirects

Recently, I watched all 5 seasons of Angel on DVD, and now I'm watching all 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I realize that I'm going backwards, but I just had to know Angel's back story.) If you've watched the shows, you know that the character Angel starts off as one thing and ends up as something completely different.

URL redirects are like Angel in this respect; they start off as one thing and end up as something else. In the process, Adwords auto-tagging (the "gclid") frequently gets "slain". Let's look at how we can address the resulting reporting problems.

First, a quick review of the back story.

Adwords auto-tagging makes it possible for you to see Adwords information in your Google Analytics reports without manually tagging each keyword. You simply enable auto-tagging in your Adwords account. The auto-tagging option is located on the My Account tab, on the Account Preferences page (click image to enlarge):


If you select this option, Adwords automatically appends a "gclid" parameter to your destination URLs:

www.example.com/?gclid=123xyz

If you already have query parameters in your URL, it will look something like this:

www.example.com/?param=a&gclid=123xyz

(Note that in the first example, "gclid" is preceded by a "?" and in the second example, it is preceded by a "&". Remember this distinction because it will be important later on.)

What if you're also using a third-party tracking system such as DoubleClick, or your destination URL redirects to a second or even third URL before Adwords users arrive on your site? Will the gclid be retained or get slain?

That depends on the tracking system or behavior of your redirects. This is a very important question to address before you enable auto-tagging.

Some redirects strip the gclid. While Google Analytics still records the visit and the subsequent user activity, it doesn't have the information necessary to properly attribute the visit to your Google ad. As a result, some of this traffic will be included in the "direct" category while other visits may show up as "not set". Furthermore, your Adwords Campaigns report in Google Analytics may show cost metrics, but your visits columns may show zeros (click image to enlarge):


Ugh! Can you prevent this from happening?

Absolutely! Performing a simple test before you enable auto-tagging will ensure that you receive valuable information on your Google campaign performance. Here are the steps for two URL scenarios:

Scenario 1
If your destination URL has no query parameters and looks something like this: www.i_will_redirect_you.com/:

1. Paste this URL in your browser's address bar, but before you press Enter, append "?gclid=test" to the end, like this: www.i_will_redirect_you.com/?gclid=test.
   
   
2. Now press Enter.
   
   
3. If the gclid is present on the final landing page URL, you're golden. If not, keep reading to learn about your alternatives.

Scenario 2
If your destination URL already has query parameters and looks something like this: www.i_will_redirect_you.com/?param=a&param2=b:

1. Paste this URL in your browser's address bar and before pressing Enter, append "&gclid=test" to the end, like this: www.i_will_redirect_you.com/?param=a&param2=b&gclid=test.
   
   (This is why the "?" and the "&" distinction were important to note earlier. It's a matter of URL syntax. Luckily, auto-tagging knows the difference.)
   
   
2. Press Enter.
   
   
3. If the gclid is still there, you're in good shape, and need only to enable auto-tagging. If not, what are your options? Read on.

If the gclid is not retained during your test, you're not out of luck. Here are a couple of suggestions:

Suggestion 1. Ask your friendly admins or third-party contact to please configure their servers to pass the gclid. If you're not sure what this means, don't worry, your server admin does. It's like repeating something in a foreign language you don't speak. If your pronunciation is good, a native speaker will understand you and all will be perfecto!

Suggestion 2. If suggestion 1 isn't possible, you'll need to manually tag your destination URLs instead of enabling auto-tagging. (This is one of the very few circumstances in which you should manually tag destination URLs in AdWords.)

The best way to get started with manual tagging is to use the online URL Builder. You'll need to fill in your landing page URL and fill in the campaign name, source, medium, and term (keyword). Then, press "Generate URL" and you'll have a URL that will correctly report campaign information to Google Analytics.

You probably already know how to use this tool based on an earlier post we made, but here is an example followed by step-by-step instructions on a recommended way to use i:


Step 1. Put the final landing page URL in the Website URL field. The reasoning behind this is that since the gclid is stripped by the redirects, the manual tags will most likely be stripped as well. In our example above, www.example.com is the URL to which Adwords users are redirected.

Step 2. Fill in each of the additional fields as follows:

• Campaign Source: "google" in lower case
  
  
• Campaign Medium: "cpc" for cost-per-click campaigns or "cpm" for our cost-per-impression campaign model
  
  
• Campaign Term: fill in your AdWords keyword
  
  
• Campaign Content: if tagging your keywords individually, leave this field BLANK. If you're only tracking Google ad unit performance, as in the case of running a campaign that is running exclusively on our content network, fill in an ad unit identifier, such as a text ad's headline or the name you've given your display ads.
  
  
• Campaign Name: this is the name of the campaign you've set up in the Google ad system. Assuming you've linked your Google Analytics and Adwords accounts, it is important to type in the campaign name exactly as it appears in our ad system. Otherwise, the Clicks tab of the Adwords Campaigns report in Google Analytics will have multiple entries for the same campaign. Cost information such as impressions and clicks will be listed next to the campaigns that are running in our ad system, while visit information will be listed next to the campaign names you've typed into the URL Builder, and that would just be confusing!
  

When you generate the URL, you will end up with something like this, personalized with your keyword and campaign, etc.:

http://www.example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=keyword&utm_campaign=Adwords%2BCampaign%2BA

Once a person clicks on an ad and finishes her journey through the land of redirects, she'll see the URL above in their address bar. Also, in the case of third-party redirects, this is the URL you'll want to send to your vendor to convert into tracking tags.

If you're running a campaign with many keywords, here's a helpful tip: Only use the URL Builder for the first URL. Then, use Excel's handy "concatenation" function to create an Excel worksheet that generates the rest automatically.

Even if your campaigns are free of redirects, it's still a good idea to test for auto-tagging compatibility before enabling it. You may still need to have that cryptic conversation with your server admins about "configuring the server to pass the gclid." In any case, never use auto-tagging and manual tagging in the same Adwords account. Even though your users won't be affected, your Google Analytics reports will not be accurate and you'll spend more time trying to make sense of the numbers than optimizing your Google campaigns.

As always, happy tracking! And now back to Buffy…

Posted by James Tipton, Google Analytics Team