Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What are Google Ads reports?
You can use Google Ads reports in GA4 to drive insights from the Google Ads traffic beyond the click. You can find out who clicked your ads and what actions they took afterwards (such as purchasing from your website, signing up for a subscription, or downloading a mobile app). You can then see which aspects of your Google Ads strategy are performing best.
Like all other reports in GA4, you can segment the Google Ads reports by changing the primary dimension of the report to toggle between Campaign, Ad Group, Keyword, Search Query, and other segments. You can also add secondary dimensions to measure data such as hour of the day, date, landing page, and so on. If you are using secondary dimensions, you will mostly likely need to export the report and further analysis in MS Excel or another spreadsheet tool to dig deep into the metrics.
Integrating Google Ads with GA4
The key advantage of integrating Google Ads with GA4 is that you can identify your high-performing Google paid-search campaigns, ad groups, and keywords and, in turn, then identify the events, conversions, or e-commerce transactions by campaign and other dimensions.
Remember, in GA4, you can create valuable events (or user actions) that you want to track, such as viewing a video, downloading a brochure, adding an item to cart, and so on. When you integrate Google Ads with GA4, you can then analyze these events and how they relate to matched search queries, keywords, and hours of the day.
You can also see Google Ads performance data for search, shopping, and video campaigns directly in Google Analytics. All the channel options available within the Google Ads suite can be viewed in terms of their own specific metrics within the Google Ads reports.
Optimizing paid search performance with Google Ads reports
Identify optimum times and queries
Having all these insights into your Google Ads performance can have a significant impact on your paid search strategy. The Google Ads reports, for example, can help you recognize opportunities for optimizing your paid search budget so that more funds are allocated to higher-performing campaigns.
What’s particularly useful is that can also identify the optimum time of day for a Google Ads spend campaign. To do this:
- Identify your high-transaction, high revenue, or high-lead-generating campaigns, keywords, and search queries in Google Analytics 4.
- Go back to Google Ads, and increase the campaign daily budgets and keyword bid thresholds or cost per acquisition (or CPA) targets in your smart bidding strategies to drive more traffic at the most important times and from the most important campaigns and keywords.
- Conversely, remember to decrease your budget for lower-performing times and queries so that you don’t waste funds on campaigns that aren’t delivering optimum results.
Identify zero-revenue keywords
As well as identifying optimum times and search queries, you can find out which keywords are delivering the best return on investment (or ROI). And you can unearth those keywords that are costing money but not driving conversions or revenue. In GA4, you can see all the zero-revenue or non-converting keywords by sorting.
Follow these steps to identify zero revenue campaigns and keywords:
- Download your data into Excel and add a filter from the Data menu in Excel or Google Sheets, for example.
- Unselect all revenue apart from the number 0 to view all keywords that drive no revenue.
- You can create different conditions using the ‘less than’ or ‘greater than’ options in this filter area to find the items you are most interested in, such as high-value keywords or campaigns.
- You can also quickly compare Brand and Non-Brand campaign performance if you have noted these words in your campaign names by filters and pivot tables in MS Excel.
Drive performance
So, by integrating Google Ads and GA4, you can identify which keywords and search queries are driving the most revenue, conversions, events, or traffic. Armed with these insights, you can then optimize your Google Ads campaigns to drive performance.
It’s also important, as we saw, to identify your high-cost, low-revenue keywords. You can then set these as negative keywords to optimize your paid search budget.
Back to TopCathal Melinn
Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst, and eommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.
Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specializes in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimization. Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.
Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue-generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.
Over his career, Cathal has worked client-side too, with digital marketing agencies and media owners, for brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.
He can be reached on LinkedIn here.
Clark Boyd
Clark Boyd is CEO and founder of marketing simulations company Novela. He is also a digital strategy consultant, author, and trainer. Over the last 12 years, he has devised and implemented international marketing strategies for brands including American Express, Adidas, and General Motors.
Today, Clark works with business schools at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Columbia University to design and deliver their executive-education courses on data analytics and digital marketing.
Clark is a certified Google trainer and runs Google workshops across Europe and the Middle East. This year, he has delivered keynote speeches at leadership events in Latin America, Europe, and the US. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Slideshare. He writes regularly on Medium and you can subscribe to his email newsletter, hi, tech.
