AdWords is Google’s advertising system that allows businesses to generate text and display ads.
Text ads show up next to Google search results by matching keywords you can bid on
with users’ search queries. Display ads are advertisements consisting of text, images,
animation, or video that show up on a vast collection of websites called the Google Display
Network. Since the Google Store wants to sell t-shirts, they could bid on keywords such
as “Google t-shirt” and “Google clothing.” When people search Google for a particular
product like “a really cool Google t-shirt,” AdWords will show a relevant text ad for the
Google Store if the ad meets AdWord’s quality guidelines. This type of advertising can help
attract customers from the millions that use Google Search and the Display Network every day.
When you link your Google Analytics account to your Google AdWords account, you can:
view AdWords click and cost data alongside your site engagement data in Google Analytics;
create remarketing lists in Analytics to use in AdWords campaigns; import Analytics goals
and transactions into AdWords as conversions; and view Analytics site engagement data in AdWords.
To set up an AdWords account, navigate to
the link at the end of this lesson and follow the instructions to create an account. It
should take less than twenty minutes. To link Google Analytics with AdWords, first make
sure you are logged into Analytics using the same email as your AdWords account. You can
find the email you’re signed in with in the upper right-hand corner. Note that you
must be an administrator on both accounts. Next, click the Admin tab. Then make sure
you’ve selected the account and the property you wish to link to your AdWords account.
Under the Property section, select “AdWords linking.”
Any AdWords accounts you have linked to your Google account will automatically appear.
Check which account you wish to link and click “continue.” Next, type in a “Link Group Title."
This could be your AdWords account ID. Now select the view in which you want
the AdWords data to appear and select “Link accounts.” The linked account will show
in your Link group list with the title you entered. When you link your Google Analytics
and AdWords accounts, campaign data is shared between the two systems, but it still requires
campaign tracking. Although you can manually add campaign tracking tags to AdWords URLs
using the URL Builder as we did earlier, there is a better option. AdWords can automatically
add a special campaign tag to your AdWords URLs through a feature called auto-tagging.
Auto tagging is required to get specific AdWords dimensions into Google Analytics. Once we
have linked AdWords with Analytics, we can find AdWords reports under the “Acquisition” section
in the left-hand navigation. If we click on the “Campaigns” report, we can see how
well our various AdWords campaigns are performing. Notice that this report organizes AdWords
campaigns using the same names assigned in AdWords. This is one of the benefits of linking AdWords
with Analytics. Note at the top of the report you can switch between desktop, mobile, and
tablet metrics to view the performance of campaigns across different devices. In the
data table below, you can use the Acquisition metrics to see the clicks for each campaign
and the total amount paid for those clicks. CPC shows the average cost for each click.
Under Behavior, you can see user engagement for each campaign. And under Conversions,
you can see the conversion rate, the number of actual goal completions, and how much these
conversions were ultimately worth to your business for each AdWords campaign. You can use the
pulldown menu under 'Conversions' to show data for each of your goals.
Now let’s look at the “Keywords” report. This can help you understand how well keywords and
individual ads are performing. For example,
if a keyword is bringing in a lot of traffic but has a high bounce rate, it might indicate
a disconnect between the ad and landing page content. If you have a keyword with a high
conversion rate but low number of impressions (or number of times an ad was shown), you
may want to raise your bid for that keyword, so the ad is shown more often and reaches
a larger audience. You could also add “Device Category” as a secondary dimension to break
out these keywords by the kinds of devices that users were on when they clicked your
ad and visited your site. Finally, let’s look at the “Bid adjustments” report.
Bid adjustments are an AdWords feature used to automatically adjust keyword bids based
on a user’s device, location, or time of day. For example, if the Google Store opens
a temporary location during the holidays to sell merchandise, they might want to add a
bid adjustment to increase ad visibility on mobile devices within three miles of the store
during the hours of operation. The Bid Adjustment report in Analytics lets you analyze AdWords
performance for the bid adjustments you've set for your campaigns. You can use the selector
at the top of the table to evaluate campaign performance by the device, location, time
of day, and remarketing list bid adjustments. We’ll cover remarketing in an advanced course.
To see all of your bid adjustments and metrics for a specific campaign, you can click on
that campaign name in the list. You can see how powerful AdWords can be for you business
when paired with Google Analytics. It allows you to really understand the value of your
marketing and make adjustments to improve your return on investment.