If you buy keywords on Google AdWords, you can use Google Analytics to
see how well your paid keywords perform in terms of conversion rates,
revenue, and ROI. Here's how.
Let's start with the AdWords campaigns report. Here we can see the results from all AdWords
traffic to the site. There were 151 visits with about 15 pages
viewed per visit and over one minute per visit spent on the site.
About 93 percent of these visits were from people who had never been to
the site before. And about 14 percent of the visits resulted
in the visitor immediately leaving the site.
The bounce rate is very important. And ideally, it is quite low since you are
paying for each of these visits.
Let's look at the goal conversion tab to look at our conversion rates.
This is a small photography portfolio site. And we can see the percentage of visits in
which people looked at the various portfolios.
Over half of the visits resulted in at least one conversion, and there
was a per visit value of $2.54. This value is calculated from the goal values.
This isn't an E-commerce site, so let's skip right over to the clicks
data. AdWords ads were displayed 8,331 times but
people only clicked on an ad 140 times.
By the way, it's common for clicks and visit 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 directly
to the site through a bookmark.
The referral information from the original visit was retained, so some
clicks resulted in multiple visits. Continuing on, we can see that we spent a
total of $84 for this traffic at an average of $0.60 per click.
But we made $2.74 per click, which gives us an ROI of 356 percent.
So let's look at an individual campaign. This report has the same kind of information.
But here we're looking at all the ad groups in an individual campaign.
In this case, there's only one. So let's take a look at the keywords that
are in it. Here, we can sort our keywords based on ROI.
An ROI of zero percent means that you earned in revenue the same amount
of money that you spent. In these cases, there were zero clicks and
therefore zero cost and zero revenue.
An ROI of 100 percent means that you made twice the amount of money you
spent. For example, you spent $5 and made $10.
It's not uncommon to get 300 percent or 400 percent or even a thousand
percent ROI. These kinds of numbers simply indicate that
your revenue is many times greater than your cost.
Minus 100 percent means that you didn't make any money at all on the
keyword. If all of your keywords are minus 100 percent,
you probably haven't assigned any values to your goals or your
E-commerce revenue isn't posting properly.
If you have negative ROI keywords, look and see how many clicks are
involved. If there are only a few clicks, you might
want to wait before you decide to drop the keyword.
But if you're losing money on a large number of clicks, you'll be able
to instantly increase your overall AdWords ROI by dropping the keyword.
Make sure that you're looking at more than a few days worth of data
when you make your keyword buying decisions. You may have customers that found you via
an AdWords ad who returned several times to buy.
You'll miss these conversions if you set too short of a date range and
it may take a few days for many of your visitors to become customers.
Now let's look at the keywords positions report. I can display whichever metric I want here
in the drop down. But I can also select any one of the keywords
and see how each search position performed for that keyword.
So people searching on "portrait photographer" visited 15 times from
Side Two position. But I can also change the metric here in the
drop down. So now we can see that the top two position
for this keyword referred visitors who looked at 31 pages, whereas the
top one position referred visitors who only looked at 16 pages.
So that's an introduction to how you can track your AdWords activity in
Google analytics. Thanks for listening.