Advanced Measurement

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Deep dive into Google Ads with Google Analytics

So, just to go beyond the standard metrics and the standard things we've been looking at, we're going to deep dive into some advanced metrics, and this is where we bring in Google Analytics, because Google Analytics, it looks at all aspects of your website. It looks at everything, all kinds of traffic, all kinds of activities, and it gives you that really robust understanding in a metric-based way of your site behavior.

But once we have AdWords linked to it, we can start seeing that in the context of how AdWords traffic might differ from your organic traffic, might differ from your referral traffic, or other types of traffic. So, engagement metrics are just, I suppose, they bring alive the consumer activity. They bring alive the journey, and by understanding those in the context of AdWords, we can really start deep diving into things like personas and different things like that.

Import Google Analytics Data into Google Ads

Alongside linking AdWords and Analytics, you can also link Analytics and AdWords. You can import metrics from Google Analytics into your AdWords, and that allows you to very quickly see engagement metrics associated with keywords or campaigns. For example, you can see the average time a user spends when they click through from a particular keyword.

This is quite useful because if keywords are driving a lot of engagement, you might think to yourself, "Well, what type of consumer is generally targeted by this? And what would they like to see or what is causing them to spend so long at the site?” This can just be really useful for just very quickly understanding top-level engagement metrics.

The benefit is you don't have to jump into Google Analytics to understand your AdWords data. The drawback is you don't get all of the Google Analytics metrics imported into AdWords. You only get a number of them. So Google Analytics will give you more robust, more advanced understanding. But it's still worthwhile to link your AdWords to your Analytics in that regard.

And you can do that at the AdWords interface. Likewise, at Firebase, you can understand things like in-app actions. So, how people are behaving on your app following AdWords, clicks, and different things. You can also link your Google Play Store. So, you can link the number of downloads and then follow on activity from app engagement for Android users. And then, if you have something like Salesforce, there's a direct API that allows you to share a lot of data from your CRM, if it is a Salesforce CRM to AdWords, just to see if there's any offline purchase or any additional information that is valuable, that can be imported into AdWords.

So, there are integrations and there're more integrations growing each day, and just keep an eye out for them in that particular section of AdWords.

Link Search Console to Google Ads

Likewise, there're other integrations we have within the Google Suite. So, you should always link your YouTube channel to your AdWords. That allows you ultimately to serve Ads on YouTube, but also allows you to do things like share remarketing lists.

So when we did RLSA, which are Remarketing List for Search Ads, we talked about bidding for clicks on audiences who have been on our website. But we might want to bid for clicks from people who've seen our videos or subscribed to our YouTube page. So, by integrating YouTube to AdWords, we're able to see that kind of level of detail.

Likewise, with Search Console, which is the organic measurement tool for SEOs, we can start looking at things like how our organic performance compares to our paid performance within AdWords. Always go to Link Search Console to AdWords, and if you are a shopping client, like Google shopping, you're able to link your Google Merchant Center to your AdWords which allows you to do things like serve shopping Ads or PLAs which are Product Listing Ads in shopping campaigns.

If you're an e-commerce client and if you have the Google Merchant Center, always worth linking it to AdWords. And then there's other Analytics applications that you can link in there using their APIs. As I said, integrations are growing by the day and definitely keep an eye out for any new integrations that are, you know, coming online.

But, in terms of your measurement, what this does is it just allows you to deep dive into things like video engagement, organic engagement, engagement with your Merchant Center and they're just understanding how their Analytics programs can bring to life that AdWords data within the AdWords interface.

Use annotations

Of course, the majority of people do use Google Analytics, and secondly, do make loads of changes.

So, as changes occur, they can sometimes get lost in the mix. A very useful tool within Google Analytics and highly important for any kind of AdWords activity and AdWords optimization is using a feature called Annotations. Annotations are just a little note that you leave for yourself in Google Analytics on a particular day to say, "I did this. I changed older bids. I uploaded new ads. I paused a number of campaigns." Whatever it may be.

So, when you're measuring success in Google Analytics and you see a change in behavior, if you see a change in behavior, it indicates an anomaly or something. So, what caused that? And if you can see that on that particular day, you increase bids by 10% so therefore conversions went up by 20%, you can attribute that bid increase to that increase in conversions and you can understand the success of your campaigns in terms of the actions that you have taken to optimize them and take note of them using Google Analytics Annotations.

Change history

And then, finally, as I said, we make a lot of changes in AdWords, and sometimes they get lost in the mix, and sometimes they're the wrong changes. They're things that we want to reverse. Within Change History, it is available over on the left-hand side of the toggle menu, if you set your particular date, you can see all the changes that were made within an AdWords account on that date and undo them.

You can undo the changes that were made on that particular day if too many other changes have been made afterwards. But, what it allows you to do is very quickly revert to the older version that you had previously if the changes that you made was less favorable than you expected or if someone on your team made a change and you didn't know, or if there's just something that you want to reverse, or indeed just follow the pattern of changes that have been made and just take note of what has been changed in your AdWords account.

If you look at the change history, it gives you a complete list of all of the different things that you have changed in your account, based on all of the things that you have learned on this course.