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.
