Having all the necessary data is key to decision making – wouldn’t you agree? So if you’re not linking your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts for analytics data sharing, you’re likely missing out on some really important information.
Every marketer wants to improve their understanding of their audiences. Digging in, and grasping this one task, will strengthen and further boost any marketing strategy. And in case you haven’t guessed it – at the heart of this understanding is real data.
Marketers today need to make the most of all the data which is available to them. This is especially true when using a PPC campaign strategy such as Google Adwords. It’s not wise to be kept in the dark about when it comes to campaigns and areas to focus on. Yet filtering through all that data can bog us down. One could spend unending hours digging through hundreds of metrics and not move ahead at all.
Without analyzing the traffic of your website, it’s difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the current marketing strategy you employ. And without understanding all the data, you won’t know the right time to make a change. In this era of data boom, one must take online advertising more seriously, especially with the increasing competition in all the numerous niches.
This means you need to fully understand your niche market. And you must know your ideal audience in order to promote the right content to them.
Thank goodness, we have free access to very effective tools. Top of the list is Google Analytics. As a result, this article analyzes the use of Google Analytics metrics to improve your AdWords decision making and campaigns.
5 Ways Analytics Data Sharing in AdWords Improves Decision Making
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Analytics and AdWords Are Simply Better Together
With AdWords, you know how much money your ads costs and the numbers surround your campaigns including conversions you receive. But to know what happened between the campaign and your website remains a secret, and you’d not know unless you use Google Analytics. It can let you in on what users are doing right on your site. So, if your Ads are not converting, with Google Analytics, you can find out clues as to the reason why. If you can resolve conversion rate issues, AdWords performance will improve.
The easiest way to begin enjoying these metrics is to import the Google Analytics view into AdWords. This helps you to access four new columns of data, which include: pages/visit, bounce rate, the percentage of new visits and the average visit duration. This is very useful in getting a complete picture of what’s going on with your ads but does not eliminate the need for digging deeper into Analytics.
- Related: What is Google Analytics?
- Related: How does Google AdWords Work?
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Discover Poor Performing Landing Pages
Use the “Bounce Rate” and the “average time on site” columns in addition to the “Conversion Rate” to know the ads which do not appeal to or engage users.
Then, you can analyze the bad pages and find possible solutions that can include one or more of the following: Correct the keyword relevance, experiment with landing page design, fix misleading ads that case a disconnect for the user. If your site has a high bounce rate, then you must address the issue as to why users have the impression that your site or information on it is unreliable.
Although AdWords is a good place to identify bad landing pages, the data reporting and segmenting is not the best.
To be very effective, you must use the data available for the landing pages associated with the whole of your account, and here is where the report of Google Analytics on landing pages is useful. When multiple AD groups use the same landing page (which have the same URL), the statistics must be segmented, and you must spot the bad landing pages once isolated to zero in on the problem.
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Focus On The Most Important Areas
The combination of both AdWords and Analytics helps you focus on what matters most. There are three important sections for marketing. These are acquisition, the audience, and behavior.
The “Acquisition” tab provides detailed information on how users discover or arrive your website. When you dive into the ‘All traffic’ tab, you’ll see exactly how users find and enter to your site. Whether from social networking sites or it’s a search engine or even a blog for which you are a contributor. However, visitors often come multiple times, and in multiple ways to your site. Understanding how each source affects your website performance is key to understanding your marketing performance at a higher level.
Diving deeper into the role Adwords plays in this acquisition cannot be fully understood unless you consider their effect on these other sources.
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Audience Demographics
The audience section contains a large amount of data about the people visiting your blog or site. It has in it several subsections which contain information about: gender, geographical location, age, etc. of visitors to your site. You will also find information about visitors’ interests, browsers, and even mobile devices which users use to visit your website.
Although this can be seen on Adwords as for the traffic it is sending, understanding how the traffic performs once it arrives is key to making better decisions.
Understanding who visits your site concerning age, location, and gender is the best way to personalize your site based on your interests and preferences. If you desire the content and images on your site to be in line with those wanted by your audience, you must know who they are and what they want. To get this metric or information, go to the audience tab.
For instance, if about 90% of visitors to your site are women, you can provide a more targeted or personalized experience on the site by making the salutation on your ‘Welcome’ or ‘about’ pages to say “Hello Ladies”!
It wouldn’t make sense to tell senior citizens “treat yo self,” but it will make complete sense to millennials, this is either done or avoided through the knowledge of the age metric on Google analytics. It helps refine your language.
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Content Drill-Down
It’s also important to look into the content to see which pages are getting more and or less time. This is done by clicking on the Behavior tab, then go to the site content drop down menu. It is recommended that you look at the content drill down, landing pages, and even the exit pages to see the most frequently viewed pages on your site, or the pages from which most traffic is lost.
The Content Drilldown metric is a general description of the most visited pages on your site. This is information that is just not available within Adwords alone, but with the help of analytics, you can see which of your services page is the most popular. It also tells you which content your audience prefers and this means you need to produce more of it.
Google Analytics in every way helps in making better and more effective decisions. Coupled with the power of Google Adwords marketing strategy for traffic attraction, you’re able to improve your performance overall.
Leave me a comment below, do you use analytics in tandem with your Google Adwords account to make better marketing decisions?
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