Should you link your Google Adwords account to Analytics? -

Link Google Adwords to Analytics

If you are not sure weather connecting Google Analytics to Adwords is a good idea, this guide will tell you exactly what you can do if you choose to make this change.

1. Connect Adwords to Analytics – benefits:

– you can see the data from your Adwords Reports in your Analytics account
– take advantage of the Analytics Multi-Channels funnel report to see the sources that sent users to your site, built awareness and trust for your brand, ultimately leading to the sales that you wanted – search ads, blog posts, organic searches etc. Visualize the list of the best referrals, the value of the conversions, the path length and time lag that was necessary for users to become customers so that you could have a clear view on where you should invest your money.
– import Analytics metrics, goals and E-commerce transaction into your Adwords account
– impressive remarketing possibilities

What do you need to link your Google Adwords account to Analytics?
– a Google Account with edit permission for the Analytics property that will be linked
– administrative access to the Adwords account which needs to be linked.

How to link Adwords to Analytics:
– sign in to your Google Analytics account
– click the Admin tab
– from Account select the one that has the analytics account containing the property you need
– click on Adwords Linking in the Property column
– select the checkbox next to your Adwords account and click continue

– give a name to your group of linked AdWords accounts in the Link configuration section if you have several and you need to set different options for separate groups. For example, you can link specific Adwords accounts to different views of the same Analytics property or keep auto-tagging enabled only for some Adwords accounts.
– select the Analytics view for your Adwords account data
– click Skip if you agree to have auto-tagging enabled for all your selected Adwords accounts or Advanced settings if you want to manually tag your AdWords links. If you choose the latter, you will have several disadvantages such as a smaller number of dimensions and data available under your Adwords section.
– click on Link Accounts.

You’re done! If you have auto-tagging enabled you will immediately start to see data regarding clicks from Adwords into your Analytics account.

2. Where do you find Adwords in your Analytics account?

The path is simple: Reporting – Acquisition – Adwords.

3. What reports can you access and how do they help you?

Google Analytics > Acquisition > AdWords > Campaigns

Here you will find data about your ability to attract new users, how much money they are spending on your site and how are they engaging with your pages. You can see different data for desktop, mobile, tablet and you can visualize data for different campaigns specific to certain device types such as website campaigns and mobile app install campaigns.

The main things to follow in a website campaign are: the new users number(see Acquisition metrics), the engagement of your users(investigate Adwords-Campaigns-Explorer-Site Usage or Behaviour metrics to see things like pages the viewed, bounce rate, average time on page or the number of exits from a page/set of pages) and the conversion rates(check in Adwords>Campaigns>Explorer>Summary and select the appropriate metrics to have a clear view on things like e-commerce conversion rate, goal complitions, transactions and revenue).

“Mobile app installs” campaigns are curently available only for the Display Network, but they can help you a lot to improve the targetting precision of potential customers and increase your conversion rate. You can now choose to focus your efforts towards people with the optimal age, gender and placements and even further, filter them to have your ad shown exclusively to those who downloaded a paid app from the same category as your app, people who activated new mobile phones and need apps or simply have your ad shown only on apps within a specified category like Productivity. If you want to know how to create an app install campaign, just follow the link. You can check their performance in the Display tab. Conversions are not shown in real time because it takes time to transfer data between a person’s device, Google, and the third party tracking services you might use. So pay attention to Google when it says: “when reviewing your conversion reports, note that the previous 3 days of conversion data may not be complete yet”, don’t base your decisions on incomplete information.
If you want to interract with people who are already using your app, create a mobile app engagement campaign. If you want to know how users are engaging with your app, just look at look at the Sessions, Screen Views, and Avg. Session Duration metrics (in the default App Usage metric group on the Explorer tab) in your Analytics account. If you want to check how much money you got, investigate Revenue and Goal Completions metrics (Explorer-App usage) or simply click on Goal Set or Ecommerce metric groups.

Google Analytics > Acquisition > AdWords >Bid Adjustments

See your bidding adjustments by Device, Location, or Ad Schedule and click on the campaign that you want the data to be displayed for.

Google Analytics > Acquisition > AdWords >Adwords Keywords

Find out the keywords and ad headline performance in your AdWords account. Things like traffic, bounce rate or revenue will indicate you if you are using the right keywords. After looking at the data you can take decisions like an expert: bid more to maintain the high conversion rate and adjust the low traffic for great keywords, replace the ones with the bounce rate almost as high as their traffic volume and experiment with variants that are closely related of your keywords such as plurals.

You can also use the data from this report to discover new great keywords that you are not yet targeting and eliminate the irrelevant keywords which you can also add to the negative keywords list in your Adwords campaigns.

Google Analytics > Acquisition > AdWords >Matched Search Quieries

See the search quieries that triggered the display of your ad and notice how many queries correspond to each keyword. If your keyword matches only one search query and the conversion rate for it is very low, you can then consider replacing the keyword or at least changing its match type in Broad match for example. If you want to see how your matched search quieries perform separated by campaign, you can always create a custom report easy to share, that better fits your preferences and needs.

Google Analytics > Acquisition > AdWords > Hour of Day

The report view can show you different sets of data. You can switch between Hour of Day and Day of Week to see the best time for conversions, traffic and goals completion.

Google Analytics > Acquisition > AdWords > Destination URLs

If you wonder which is the best performing landing page used in your ads, this is the report that will make things clear for you – when people like your ad and decide to click on it, the page that they will see creates a first impression on them that will be reflected in your results that are available for you to see in the conversion rate.

Google Analytics > Acquisition > AdWords > Placements

For increased efficiency, you can see the traffic for automatic and managed placements on the Google Display Network, the domains and URLs on which your ads are placed and their performance. If you notice a high conversion rate for a particular domain on automatic, you could add it to managed placements list and adjust your bids.

Google Analytics > Acquisition > AdWords > Keyword Positions

Being no. 1 for a keyword doesn’t automatically translate in an extremely high conversion rate even if you get a lot of traffic for them. Check what is the position where you get the best performance for each keyword and adjust your bids accordingly.

Google Analytics > Acquisition > AdWords >Video Campaigns

This report will be displayed for your TrueView video ad campaigns and presents different sets of data in Adwords and Analytics. In your Adwords report you see the conversions based on ads being viewed, while the Analytics report considers conversions to be direct clicks from your TrueView in-stream video ads. If you want to try the best and the newest, you may try to get access and see the full impact of unclicked display and video ad impressions in Google Analytics , but you will need to sign up for it and have your request accepted. This brand new feature is currently available only for some users through a limited whitelist.

4. Summary

As you could clearly see, the advantages from linking your Adwords to your Analytics account are undeniable. They give a more detailed view on important aspects relevant for decision making:
– time – you can track the evolution of your campaigns in time and see what areas perform better in time. Identify the days of the week and hours of the day when your ad is most successful. Be careful though not to judge the facts after only a couple of days, as the data might be misleading and the trend a mere illusion.
– location: see the regions with the highest conversion rate, those with a rising number of new visitors and also the bounce rate leaders. You can spot the cities or countries where your ads are not performing well and eliminate them (how) so that you can shift your investment in the most profitable areas.
– evolution – see what your users behaviour after they clicked on your ad. You can see at what stage in the conversion funnel you have the highest drop-off and check if it’s a technical issue, a content issue or poor design.