How to Imporve Adwords Campaign with Analytics

For most businesses and clients who run an Adwords campaign one of the key parameters based on which they tend to judge the success of the campaign is clicks or number of visitors. I often get clients who would ask me if we commit a monthly budget of $xxxx how many visitors can you send us. In this case we are actually missing the proper picture of the campaign and we would probably fail completely in analyzing the success of an Adwords campaign if our focus remains completely on visitors.

As an Internet marketing consultant I feel that it is my duty to educate my clients where necessary and this is one of the key areas that I often spend hours explaining to them. To properly measure the success of an Adwords campaign we need to track much more than just visitors to the site.

Google Analytics makes it a breeze to get all the necessary data and here are few parameters that I feel we should always track in a Adwords campaign ( any paid search campaign, for that matter)

• Clicks – Yes, I never said don’t track clicks. This is a basic information that most Adwords advertisers or clients would be interested in .
• CTR – Click Through Rate is another important factor, it would definitely show the rate of response to your ads. A low CTR tells you that its time to check your ad copies ( also might be due to low average position)
• Bounce Rate – As an Adwords consultant I feel this is one of the key factors that people should track but often doesn’t. Your campaign might have a high CTR, and get good number of visitors but what if 90% of your visitors leave the website just after arriving on the landing page. Does that do any good to you ? It basically consumes a lot of your budget, shows a lot of traffic to your website but doesn’t get you any or very minimal conversion. It is important that we track the bounce rate on a regular basis at a Keyword level and try to keep it as low as possible.Typically when you see high bounce rate for a keyword, check your landing page. It is often seen that if the landing page doesn’t match the keywords or doesn’t talk in same lines as your ad copy your visitors would bounce off pretty fast.
• Conversion & Conversion Rate – Goes without saying that almost all Adwords advertisers would track their goal conversion and the conversion rate. If you have a lot of keywords in broad match and you see conversions coming from some of the long tailed keywords initiated by the Broad match terms, try to detect them through your Google Analytics, pick them up separately and put them in a separate Ad group on Exact Match. This will ensure that these keywords get their fair share of budget and you are likely to see an imediate boost in your campaign.
• Call To Action Tagging – Though not really a part of analytics tagging your call to action links gets you extremely important analytical data. It tells you a lot about your landing page, which call to actions are working for you and which are not. Adwords has got an inbuilt tool for tagging links which can come very handy for this purpose, however, if you are tagging a link make sure to test the link after you add it to your website. It is often seen that due to improper tagging some of your key links stops functioning.
• Also you can look at the average time spent on site by visitors, number of pages visited etc at a keyword and ad group level to judge the quality of traffic your Adwords campaign is sending to your website. For these you would however need to use the Custom Reports feature in Google Analytics.

CPC or Cost per Click is again an important parameter to be measured , however, as it is a very common and relatively simple parameter that is measured by almost everyone I have not gone into the details of it.

What do you guys measure for your Adwords accounts or what other parameters do you think is important to measure for an Adwords campaign ?

Recommended Resource: Discover your competitors Adwords keywords, ads, budgets and more
Related Article: How to Improve Your Google Adwords Quality Score