Building A Centralized Digital Marketing Platform With Google Analytics

The following is a guest post contributed by Google Analytics Certified Partner Daniel Waisberg.

Think about your business as a train. It has a locomotive and several wagons, each with its own function and importance (e.g., a restaurant wagon, a restroom wagon, and a luggage wagon). Now, let's say Google Analytics is the locomotive of the train, it is used to drive the business forward in a data-driven way. Together with it we find several important wagons: AdWords, AdSense, Webmaster Tools and others. How would you like those wagons to be tightly integrated?

This is the idea behind Google Analytics Integrations, an eBook that describes the official integrations available on Google Analytics. Currently it is possible to integrate the data from several Google tools into Google Analytics such as AdWords, AdSense, Webmaster Tools and YouTube. This enables marketers and analysts to import a wealth of information into Google Analytics, presenting a broad picture of their digital marketing efforts. 

In the eBook you will find a step-by-step guide to linking those tools as well as an explanation of what you can do with the resulting data. Let's suppose you are a new advertiser using both Google Analytics and AdWords, but the accounts are currently not linked. While you can use AdWords reports to analyze effectiveness of your campaigns, by linking the accounts you will be able to understand the bigger picture of website behavior in comparison to your AdWords campaigns. This information can help improving campaign performance by shedding light on which campaigns are failing as a result of suboptimal targeting, poorly designed landing pages, or poor ads; and which campaigns are succeeding. 

For example, let's look at the "Day Parts" report on Google Analytics (if your accounts are already linked here is a direct link to the report). 

The Day Parts report is for exploring hour-of-day and day-of-week dimensions. This report is useful for gaining insights into optimizing ad scheduling in campaign settings within AdWords.  

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In the figure above, we see that this advertiser sees its traffic peak between 5 and-8 P.M. When adding a secondary dimension of per visit value, however, we see that the per visit value of visitors is highest during the morning hours of 6-9A.M: 

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If this was your report, the practical next step you would take would be to adjust the ad scheduling settings in your campaigns to drive more traffic to the site during those morning hours, as that traffic is more valuable. Here is how to do it:

1. Navigate to a specific campaign in the AdWords interface.
2. Choose the Campaign Settings tab.
3. Under Advanced Settings, click the plus (+) box next to Schedule: Start Date, End Date, Ad Scheduling.
4. Next to Ad Scheduling, choose Edit.
5. Change mode from Basic to Bid Adjustment.
6. Under Time Period (next to day of week), click to reveal an overlay.
7. Adjust the bid settings (by a percent multiplier to increase or decrease bids). There is a button to copy to other days to speed up making these changes.
8. Click OK and then save.

If you are interesting only in the AdWords integration, check the Google Analytics For PPC eBook, which includes only information about integrating and analyzing AdWords using Google Analytics. This eBook had an important contribution from Yehoshua Coren. 

Daniel Waisberg is author of Google Analytics Integrations and Founder of Online Behavior, a Marketing Measurement and Optimization portal.