3 Ways to Improve the Effectiveness of Your Adwords Campaign with Google Analytics
Planning, running, and monitoring an Adwords campaign is a grueling task with uncertain outcomes. Without a coherent framework to help you understand how each of your tools fits into your digital strategy and marketing workflow, an abundance of tools just leads to an abundance of confusion.
What this article and the articles to come will do is provide you with a framework on how to connect these various free tools offered by Google in order to provide you with structure during your digital marketing process while also helping you achieve a higher return on investment from your campaigns.
In this article, we are going to explore three simple ways you can incorporate Google Analytics into your Google Adwords workflow that will allow you to accurately target your customers.
This article will also help you measure the concrete business impact of your Adwords campaigns in terms of user behavior and the resulting number of conversions you achieve.
Choosing the correct demographic to target
First of all, you should use Google Analytics to help you choose an audience group to target during the planning stage of your Adwords campaign.
More specifically, Google Analytics can help you in two areas: identifying opportunities to engage with your “aspirational core audience”, and identifying the best audience group to engage with if you are unsure of who to target.
Identifying the current status of your “aspirational core audience” and figuring out the best way to engage with them.
More often than not, you will walk into Adwords advertising with some specific user group or “core audience” already in mind. This user group might already visit your website a lot but one which you want to improve engagement with, or it might be a group that doesn’t currently visit often and which you want to bring into the fold.
Regarding your “aspirational core audience”, Google Analytics can help you understand where you fall short in terms of attracting this group whether that’s getting them to visit your website, getting them to engage with your website, or getting them to convert on your website.
Based on the performance of metrics that track your “aspirational core audience” on your site, you should perform the following actions.
Low Overall Traffic or % New Traffic: Attract more people to visit your website
High Bounce Rate: Improve your user group’s landing page experience or adjust your ad copy and keywords.
Low Pages/Session or Avg. Sessions Duration: Improve your website flow or the design of individual pages.
Low Conversion Rate: Optimize your conversion funnel
2. Identify a user group from which you can easily reap the benefit
If you don’t have an “aspirational core audience” in mind, worry not. Google Analytics can help you find the users who are already engaging well with your website.
Google Analytics provides over 10 characteristics related to your users that can help you slice and dice your key metrics and help you identify this existing user group that is currently the best performing on your website.
Active User: Track active users for increments of 1, 7, 14, and 28 days, and stay abreast of the level of user enthusiasm for your site
Lifetime Value: Understand how valuable different user groups to your business based on lifetime performance
Cohort Analysis: It helps to understand that user engagement is actually changing over time
Demographics: Understand the age-and-gender composition of your audience to precisely tailor your content and ads
Interests: Interest information gives you context for expanding your advertising into related markets (Affinity Categories), and focuses your advertising on market segments with purchase intentions
Geo: You want information from the areas you already target in your advertising, but you should also know about traffic from other geographic areas
Behavior: Measure the gravitational pull of your site
Technology: Browser & OS, Network
Mobile: Devices
Custom: Custom Variables, User Defined
Benchmarking: Compare your data with industry data
Users Flow: Users access paths on your website
By targeting user groups who are already interacting well with your website, you will have a much higher chance of achieving a high return on investment in your campaign.
Furthermore, you’ll have a good chance of guaranteeing that those user groups will have a great experience on your website because people similar to them already have.
Identifying Effective and Ineffective Keywords and Ad Copies
The second way you can incorporate Google Analytics into your Adwords workflow is during the keyword and ad-copy optimization stage.
To accomplish this, you need to integrate Google Analytics and Google Adwords. Fortunately, you can do this with one button click in Google Analytics (instructions here).
After integrating both tools, the Adwords selection under the Google Analytics Attribution Module becomes available (as displayed below).
You can also track web statistics by keyword under the “keyword” tab. There are also other features to help you optimize different aspects of Google Adwords such as time-of-the-day optimization, campaign optimization, and bid optimization.
Be warned, these statistics might surprise you. Very often, I see ad copies or keywords with a high click-through rate in Google Adwords but a very high bounce rate (this is a bad thing) on your website.
In these cases, even though specific ad-copies or keywords might appear to be high-performing on your Adwords platform, in fact, they don’t drive any concrete business benefit as users moved on from your website almost immediately after visiting it.
Similarly, sub-optimal landing page experiences will also drive down the quality score of your ads for that specific keyword. This will cause your ad placement for that specific keyword to both costs more and occupy a less advantageous position compared to other ads.
However, one thing you should notice here is that if the bounce rate for all of your Google Adwords keywords or ad copies is high it might be caused by an ineffective landing page rather than sub-optimal keywords.
In that case, you can use Google Optimize to conduct A/B testing on your page. Google automatically integrates Adwords with Google Optimize (instructions here) to provide you with a seamless A/B testing experience.
Measure the behavior of your users after they click on your ads but before converting
One wonderful thing about Google Adwords is that it automatically includes conversion rate as a metric. However, it doesn’t do a great job of telling you which ad achieved the conversion goal or what the main causes were for high or low conversion rates for a specific keyword.
Fortunately, Google Analytics can help you fill in these gaps by showing you your users’ behavior between the time when they click on your ad and the time when they convert or exit your website.
You can view the basic metrics of your Google Adwords campaign including bounce rate, traffic, engagement metrics (avg. sessions duration and pages/session), and conversion rate under the Adword module pointed to in the previous section.
To view advanced user flow information, you can either select the preconfigured “Paid Traffic” user segment or set up more advanced ad-group-based segments using the custom segment feature of Google Analytics (instructions here).
After selecting the segment you want, you can analyze your conversion funnel under the “conversion -> Goal” section of Google Analytics and your specific e-commerce conversion results (such as popular products, price per order) under the “conversion -> e-commerce” section of Google Analytics.
Overall, the information provided to you by Google Analytics about user flow optimization, page optimization, and conversion funnel optimization can help you determine which specific pages to optimize in Google Optimize to most efficiently optimize your user experience and increase your conversion rate.