A well-planned advertising campaign – whether through paid search like AdWords, social media, or even content marketing – can bring in a lot of traffic to your site, hopefully leading to more sales and more profits. But how do you know your advertising campaign is working as it should be?
In this post, we’ll take an in-depth look at how to use some of the features of Google Analytics to find out just how much benefit your advertising campaign is bringing you.
If you are running your advertising campaign through Google Adwords, tracking will be easy. The first step is to link your Google Adwords account to your Analytics account. You can do this from within the Reporting tab of your Adwords account, by clicking the option to activate Analytics.
Once your accounts are linked, you can view reports of the traffic driven by your ads in the Reporting tab of your Analytics dashboard. This should reassure you that your ads are in fact driving traffic to your site. Check out the Traffic Sources tab to compare how much traffic comes from ads compared to organic search traffic driven by SEO.
However, you can do much better than just tracking how many people the ads are directing to your site: click on the Visitors Flow option within Google Analytics to see how those visitors move through your site. Are people tempted to browse your products and find their way to the checkout? Or are they leaving the site after just a few seconds?
If the latter, you have work to do! If your ads are attracting traffic, but your site is failing to keep visitors engaged, it is time for to work on conversion optimization. What could you do to engage customers as soon as they reach your landing pages? How could you make the checkout process quicker and easier?
As well as measuring the effects of your advertising campaign, you also need to consider how much the ads are costing you to run. Check the box Apply Cost Data to compare the cost of your campaign to the resulting increase in sales. Remember: a spike in traffic is not the ultimate aim of an advertising campaign; a healthy ROI is.
If you are using an advertising platform other than Google Adwords to manage your campaign, you can still track its performance using Analytics. Use the Google URL Builder to create custom URLs for your banner adverts, so you can track which banners drive most traffic to your site.
Information about which ads are clicked on is interesting, not just for your advertising campaign, but for your approach to online marketing as a whole. If ads displaying certain bouquets attract a lot of traffic to your site, but fail to make sales of those products, is that because those bouquets are difficult to find on your site, or because the price puts customers off? Armed with information about the performance of your advertising campaign, you can begin to address these questions.
Getting information from Google Analytics is the first step on the way to improving not only your advertising campaign, but the performance of your retail florist business as a whole.
This article has been very helpful to my knowledge of Google AdWords, and I want to let you know that. I believe that it is important to understand that a well put together website is essential and not just a ton of traffic. I see a lot of traffic advertisements all over the internet. However, I don’t see as many website improving services being advertised.
Thanks for the tips. Somehow, assessing the effectiveness of any advertising campaign is really my weakness. The information here would help me a lot.
I’d heard good things about the Google URL Builder but I’ve never heard of it used for things other than in relation to AdSense/AdWords. It sounds like this is a good tactic for keeping track of hits due to advertising campaigns so I might be putting this advice to use soon. Your blog posts are always so well-thought out and explanatory; I’m glad, too, because I can use all the help I can get. These types of posts make it easy to understand and very palatable. Thank you!
I thought it was somewhat easy to create an ad campaign but far more difficult to actually measure the effectiveness of the ad campaign… apparently not so! Thanks for the info, I had no idea that the Visitors Flow tab was so important. I guess from my own stats, I need to work on keeping potential customers engaged. Maybe I’ll start with reorganizing my landing pages to make them more appealing and aid navigation.
The Google URL Builder is such a nifty little tool.
The value of A/B testing has really caught on recently in the emerging conversion optimization space.
There’s additionally a little game theory involved in which you have to see if the wear and tear of frequency and exposure of an ad location or banner time hurts CT % on return users.
I often use my analytics to adjust my advertising methods. I look to see what major keywords are being used to find me as well as what pages are being visited the most. Analytics integrates smoothly into our advertising methods when it comes to website development, I have noticed.
I got burned a few years back with Adwords, and I’ve been reluctant to try it again because I felt like I was working in the dark. I didn’t realize the extent to which GA was integrated with Adwords. This will certainly help with keeping our keyword costs down should I dare give Adwords another try.
Well, great info from a great article! It is such a nice thing to know that there is a way of tracking all of your advertising campaigns with Google Analytics. Up to this moment, I really have no idea how useful this tool is. Thank you very much for the helpful tips and I list the URL of this blog for future reference.
This is great info. Extremely helpful. It is amazing the degree to which we can track and monitor the activity on our Web sites with Google Analytics.
I’m especially interested in the Visitors Flow Tab with tracking an ad campaign. As you point out, that is an extremely important metric for analyzing the success or lack of success of the campaign.
Likewise the Apply Cost Data is something I’m going to be checking out as well.
Overall I am impressed with all of the possibilities with Google Analytics to track and monitor an AdWords campaign. It makes a great deal of sense from Google’s perspective, of course, as it makes our use of AdWords more effective, and we will spend more. But now we have a greater ability to make sure our ad dollars are spent judiciously for results.
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