Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Google AdWords provides a lot of data regarding your campaign performance.  And if you have Google Analytics installed (which you should – it’s free and easy), you have access to a lot of useful data there as well.  

It can actually be overwhelming when you first start to poke around your PPC advertising campaign or your Google Analytics account to figure out what the most valuable data really is, so let me point you in a couple key places.

The new interface has some really great ways to view, filter and analyze your Google AdWords campaign data quickly and efficiently.  These options used to only be available in the reports area, but now they can be seen for every campaign and ad group.

With the new Google AdWords interface, you now have a great new data reporting tool on the right hand side.  It is a graph that will show you the trend for the time period you have selected on several different data values.  You can change the date range to view as many days as you like – I prefer either 30 or 7 depending on the campaign.  The two data items I keep an eye on from this “30 thousand foot” view are Impressions and Cost.  Basically we are looking for any trends – up or down – of the number of impressions your ads are getting and the amount that is being spent on the entire account.  If either one has an unusual spike, there is going to be some digging to do to be sure everything is running as planned.

Also, while you are getting that overview perspective for your AdWords account, go ahead and sort campaigns and ad groups by Cost (descending). This way, your attention is focused on the highest spenders at a high level.  This will also alert you to situations where your highest spenders shouldn’t be your highest spenders and you can make changes accordingly. If you have PPC advertising questions, you might want to consider contacting a professional PPC management company with questions or to plan a consultation.

Back in January Google added new links to their free local business ads (Google Maps ads).  These new links, “Get Directions,” “Street View,” “Save to My Maps,” and “Send,” all give the searcher more ways to interact with your ad and ultimately get the information they need to visit your business.  My personal favorite is “Send” which allows the visitor to send the address not only via email but alternatively to a GPS device!  Talk about taking them by the hand and leading them to you. 

Now that there are so many more ways to interact with your local business ad, also referred to as “Google maps ads”, because they appear on the Google Maps site, wouldn’t it be nice if you had some insight into how visitors are interacting with your ad?

Now you do.  Google has given us the ability to see the analytics behind how users interact with your ad.  There is a new feature in the Google AdWords reporting feature – as a part of the Placement/Keyword Report – that allows you to view data on the following actions:

• Info window open from left hand side
• Info window open from map marker
• “Get Direction” clicks
• “Street View” clicks
• Clicks to website from the info window

They are missing my favorite – “Send” – but hopefully that is coming soon – no word from Google yet.

How can you best use this Google Maps ads data? Use it the same as you would when analyzing your site analytics – figure out where to focus your attention based on user activity.  For example, are visitors clicking Street View? Consider putting a picture of your actual location/building on the info window. 

The numbers behind opening from the left hand side vs. opening from the map marker signify to me whether your visitors are typically responding to your brilliant ad copy or if they are more concerned with the exact location of the business.  Google Maps ad data can give you insight into a visitor’s search intent and mind set.  Then let it help you to write even better ad copy for both your maps ad and your regular pay-per-click (PPC) advertising ads.

For more information on the new Google Maps ad reporting features, check out Google’s blog post on this announcement or contact a professional Google advertising agency.

My last blog was about the different ways Google AdWords tracks pay-per-click (PPC) advertising conversions and Google Analytics tracks PPC transactions. If you have a large number of site visitors who don’t purchase on the first visit, but do on subsequent visits, Google Analytics doesn’t attribute the transaction to how they found you in the first place. A way to get around that is to track revenue in Google AdWords.

I’ll have to admit that this is something relatively new to me (and a thank you to Michael Whitaker at Monitus for telling me it was possible). A search through Google AdWords help files comes up with nothing, nor did my Google reps ever explain that it could be done – they always pointed to Analytics as the tool to track revenue. And the answer is really simple – when you add conversion tracking to your thank you page, you can alter the code slightly to capture the revenue generated by an order.

You’ll need to change the YOUR-ORDER$ to be the field name of your order subtotal which can differ by shopping cart.

One note on this: I attempted to do it for a client that uses a Volusion cart and processes credit cards offline (meaning they don’t actually process the credit card at the time of order, but do it manually at a later time), but this won’t work for them. I’m guessing that this will hold true for any shopping cart; if you don’t process credit cards in real-time, it won’t work. In fact, for my client above, it also prevented conversions from tracking.

One more thing to know about tracking Google AdWords revenue: you can’t see results within the Google AdWords interface, you have to run a report to actually get the data. You’ll need to select the field “Sales Conv. Value (many-per-click)” in order to add that data to a report, and then you’ll be able to see revenue by Account, Campaign, AdGroup and even keyword by keyword, and learn how profitable your PPC campaigns really are. If you need help getting Google AdWords Revenue Tracking implemented and/ or analyzed, contact a reputable PPC management company for assistance.

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