The AdWords Reports are all about your Google AdWords performance.
These reports differ from other acquisition reports in two ways.
First, they show you information that's specific to AdWords.
For example, you can analyze how AdWords settings like match type and geographic targeting,
impact campaign performance.
Second, these reports make use of cost data imported directly from Google AdWords.
Google Analytics uses this cost data
along with your revenue data
to calculate metrics like ROI and Revenue Per Click.
These metrics, and others, allow you to evaluate
the performance of each campaign, ad group, and keyword.
In this lesson you'll learn:
how to view your AdWords campaigns in Google Analytics
how to view AdWords metrics like cost data and campaign ROI and
how to measure the impact of AdWords specific features
like Day Parting and Match Type.
The AdWords reports give you post-click performance metrics for your traffic from AdWords
so you can see what happens after visitors click on your ads.
You can view site usage metrics,
goal conversion metrics,
ecommerce activity
and revenue metrics, like ROI and revenue per click.
To start, let's first take a look at the structure of the AdWords Campaigns report.
This report contains performance metrics for your AdWords search and display campaigns.
You enter the report at the campaign level,
which is the top level of a hierarchy of reports.
By clicking one of of the Campaigns in the table,
you can drill down to the Ad Groups report
which lists all of the Ad Groups you have created for a given Campaign.
Clicking into one the Ad Groups let's you drill down to the AdWords Keywords report.
For search campaigns, this report lists all of the keywords
you've organized into a given Ad Group.
Now let's look at some of the metrics in the AdWords reports.
Visits is the number of visits your site received from AdWords campaigns.
Impressions is the number of times your ads were displayed.
Clicks shows the number of clicks your ads received and for which you paid.
It's normal for Visits and Clicks to show different numbers.
In this case, we have fewer Clicks than Visits.
The reason is that some visitors clicked on the ad, and then later,
during a different session, returned to the site through a bookmark.
The referral information from the original visit was retained,
so some clicks resulted in multiple visits.
If you have fewer Visits than Clicks, you may not have the Google Analytics Tracking
Code
correctly installed on all your landing pages.
It's also possible that some visitors clicked away from your website
or stopped that landing page from loading before the tracking code was executed.
Also, your visitors must have JavaScript, images, and cookies enabled in their browsers
in order to be tracked in Google Analytics.
However, AdWords will still be able to register clicks
from visitors who do not have those features enabled.
Impressions, clicks, cost and CTR, or click-through-rate,
all relate to how many times your ads were displayed
and how frequently people clicked on them.
These metrics can help you understand how visible and compelling your ads are.
For example, if you want a higher click-through-rate,
you might consider bidding for a better position,
or re-writing your ads so that they are more relevant to the users who search for them.
If you collect ecommerce data for your site or have set up values for your goals,
revenue-per-click, return-on-investment and margin
can help you assess keyword profitably.
ROI in particular is useful because it provides a single metric comparison
of how much you spent on AdWords
versus how much you made on your site for these visits.
An ROI of zero percent means you earned in revenue
the same amount of money that you spent.
An ROI of 100% means that you spent X and received 2X in revenue.
If your RPC numbers are all 0 and your ROI numbers are all minus 100%,
it's because you have zero revenue.
Make sure that you've set goal values,
or that you've enabled ecommerce tracking
if this is the case in your reports.
Before you make adjustments to your campaigns based on ROI metrics in Google Analytics,
consider how much you've spent and whether you have enough data yet to make a decision.
In particular, watch out for short date ranges.
It's generally not a good idea to make keyword, placement, ad or campaign changes
on the basis of a few days worth of data.
Also, consider return customers -- those that find the site via an AdWords ad
and then return later to buy again.
You'll miss repeat conversions if you set too short of a date range.
It may take days or longer for many of your visitors to become customers,
so set a date range that is at least as long as your expected sales cycle.
Now, let's take a look at some of the more specific AdWords reports.
This Bid Adjustments report lets you analyze your AdWords performance
for each of the bid adjustments you make in your campaign
based on device, location, and ad schedule.
You can use this report to identify high or low performing device types, locations, and
times of day.
Select which type of bid adjustment you want to analyze
by clicking one of the options at the top left of the report table.
Click the arrow next to each campaign name in the table
to expand the campaign and quickly view your bid adjustments
and performance metrics by device, location, or time.
You can use this data to decide
whether to increase or decrease your AdWords bid adjustments
based on how your ads perform,
helping to improve your return on investment.
The AdWords Keywords report let's you see your performance broken out
by the keywords you've chosen to target in your search campaigns.
Using this report, you can identify
which keywords are good at acquiring new visitors,
which bring in visitors who don't bounce, but engage with your site,
and which ones end up converting.
This information can help you optimize your keyword targeting strategy
to build awareness about your business,
drive conversions
and retain customers using search ads.
In the AdWords Keywords report
you can add a secondary dimensions
like Destination URL or Ad Content,
to see how the performance of your keywords differs
depending on the landing page or ad copy you use.
To see the search queries that users entered which matched your keyword lists,
visit the Match Search Queries report.
You can add in the secondary dimension "Keyword" to this report
to see which keywords specifically triggered your ads for each user query.
The Day Parts report lets you view statistics by hour of the day and by day of the week
based on the time zone settings for the relevant view.
You can use this report to analyze which times of the day
or which days of the week are most valuable for showing your ads.
For example, you might discover you have higher conversions rates and higher average value
on the weekdays,
but lower conversion value and lower conversion rate on the weekends.
In this case you might decide to adjust your bidding in AdWords
so that you're bidding more competitively during the week
when you see the most value from your site visitors.
You can also add in secondary dimensions, like Keyword,
to see if certain targeting tactics work better at particular times of the day.
The Destination URLs report lets you see the URLs in your site
to which you've directed visitors from your AdWords ads,
along with any campaign tagging in those URLs.
This functions as a landing-page report exclusively for AdWords traffic,
and given this information, you can see which of those pages is most effective
in engaging your visitors and helping them make the conversions you want.
From the Destination URLs report,
you can also easily segment your data by Ad Distribution Network.
Here you can see your data broken out by distribution network:
Google Search, Search Partners, and Content, for the Google Display Network.
The Placements report allows you to investigate
the performance of your automatic and managed placements on the Google Display Network.
It will show you the domains and specific URLs on which your ads are placed.
Using this report, you can identify if there are high performing automatic placements
that would be valuable to add as managed placements in your display campaigns.
You can also use this report to compare which placements bring you a significant amount
of new traffic,
and which ones are good at driving conversions.
If you want to see how ad position affected keyword performance, you can use the Keyword
Positions report.
First, select a keyword from the list.
Then, choose which metric you want to use to compare the performance of that keyword
by ad slot.
For example, if you choose the metric bounce rate,
you can see that the bounce rate for this keyword varies significantly
depending on which ad position the user clicked on the ad from.
By setting the metric back to visits,
you use this report to see how your keywords and bidding relate to where your ads most
often show.
For more examples of how you can use the data from the AdWords reports
to produce actionable insights,
check out the resources in this lesson.