Google Analytics 301: Evaluating Ad Performance

You’ve integrated Google Analytics and AdWords, and created a few conversion goals. Now what? Let your data do the work of evaluating ad performance by defining and monitoring conversion success.

Defining Success With Google Analytics Goal Conversions

The success of your goal conversion data will be based on its relevance to both business and marketing metrics. Learning what drives engaged visitors and leads to sales is essential for understanding which elements of an ad campaign worked well.

Fine-tune your Google Analytics goals to display just the data relevant to marketing decision-making. Whether it’s click-through rates, impression counts, or destination tracking, setting the correct goal is the basis of evaluating your ad performance.

Monitoring Conversion Tracking With AdWords

To view the conversion rates for the goals you’ve created, sign into your Google Analytics account and navigate to the Conversions menu, then the Goals menu, and finally click Overview.

The Overview page provides a dashboard summary of key performance indicators, including the total number of goal completions over time (by hour, day, week, or month). If you’ve set up monetary values for your goals, this information is also available within the dashboard, along with conversion and abandonment rates. The most relevant data will come from your custom goals, where completion data can be imported into AdWords.

To import your goal conversions into AdWords, log into your AdWords account, then click the Tools tab and select Conversions. Click Google Analytics in the left-hand menu, and check the boxes next to the goals you’d like to import. Click Continue, select the overall settings, then click Import Goals.

AdWords will correlate your site engagement metrics alongside your AdWords performance stats to show the full customer cycle, from the initial marketing interaction to full goal conversion. Look for graphical representations of data that include bounce rates, session durations, pages per session, and the percentage of first-time sessions to show how efficiently your campaigns are performing.

Using Google Analytics Reports to Gain Marketing Insight

With data pulled from both your Analytics and AdWords accounts, the Google Analytics Reports function offers a wealth of marketing insight with just a few clicks. Create your own customized reports using the abundant choices in the Customization menu, or choose from five preconfigured reporting categories for easy user insights:

• Real-time reports: Monitor user activity as it happens on your website with real-time user location data, traffic sources, and conversions.
• Audience reports: Analyze your audience with demographic data, affinity categories, in-market segments, and engagement data.
• Acquisition reports: View acquisition data from all traffic, social, campaigns, and AdWords, including detailed AdWords reports analyzing clicks, cost, CPC, bidding, keywords, and search queries.
• Behavior reports: Observe user behavior flows, view average page loading times and speed suggestions, track events, and manage events flow.
• Conversions reports: Access goal conversion data with reverse goal paths, funnel visualization, goal flow charts, Ecommerce behavior, sales performance, multi-channel funnels, and attribution models.

Google Analytics provides easy access to your site engagement metrics, and world-class data analysis tools to assist digital marketers in evaluating ad performance.