subject: Google Analytics Training: Google Adwords Campaign Reports [print this page] Google Analytics is a great tool for checking traffic coming to your website and it can provide you with an unusual (and often baffling) amount of detail that can help you to change the design of your site to gain more visitors, and coerce them to the right areas of your site.
Getting to grips with the information Google Analytics provides you with is very important when you are using Google AdWords, and remember; every click is costing you money!
Heres a quick guide on how to understand a Google AdWords Campaign Report:
Getting to know Your AdWords Campaign Reports
To find all of your AdWords-related reports in Google Analytics, head for Traffic Sources > AdWords in the main navigation
The AdWords Campaigns report, which is the first one listed, contains performance metrics for your AdWords keyword ads. This report is actually the top level of a hierarchy of other reports.
By clicking one of the Campaigns in the table, you drill down to the Ad Groups report which lists all of the Ad Groups in that Campaign.
Click one the Ad Groups and you drill down to the AdWords Keywords report which lists all of the keywords in that Ad Group.
The all important Clicks Tab
The AdWords Campaigns reports are unique in that they provide an extra tab labelled Clicks. The Click metrics are extremely useful for optimising AdWords spending.
Lets have a look at the best three metrics:
Impressions is the number of times your ads were shown.
Clicks shows the number of clicks for which you had to pay for and which your ads received.
Visits - is the number of visits your site received from Google AdWords keyword campaigns.
Its ok for Visits and Clicks to show different numbers. If this happens, it means we have fewer Clicks than Visits. This is because some visitors clicked on the ad, and then later, during a completely different session, returned directly to the site through a bookmark. The referral data from the original visit was retained, so some clicks resulted in multiple visits.
If you have a smaller amount of Visits than Clicks, you may not have the Google Analytics Tracking Code working on all your landing pages. Sometime visitors might click away from your website or stop your landing page from loading before the tracking code was executed. Also, your visitors must have JavaScript, images, and cookies enabled in their browsers in order to be tracked. However, AdWords is able to register clicks from these visitors.
How many Times were your Google Ads Displayed?
Impressions, Clicks, Cost, and CTR -- or Clickthrough Rate -- all relate to how many times your ads were shown and how often people clicked on them.
These metrics can help you to understand just how visible and compelling your ads are to searchers on these keywords.
For example, if you want a better clickthrough rate, you might consider bidding for a higher position or rewording your ad so that it is more relevant to the person searching.
If you are getting all 0s in the cost column, make sure you've linked to your AdWords account and that you've enabled autotagging.
What Keywords are most Profitable?
Revenue per Click, ROI (Return on Investment), and Margin can help you work out your keyword profitability.
For example, ROI is useful because it provides a single-metric comparison of how much you spent versus how much you made.
An ROI of 0% means that you earned in revenue the same amount of money you spent.
An ROI of 100% means that you spent, say 5, and made 10.
In other words, you spent X and received 2X in revenue.
It's not uncommon to get 500% or even 1000% ROI. High ROIs simply indicate that your Revenue is much greater than your Cost.
If your RPC numbers are all 0 and your ROI numbers are all -100%, its because you have no Revenue.
Make sure that you've set goal values or that you've allowed e-commerce tracking.
