Too many times I’ve learned new things about a program when I wasn’t necessarily looking to learn new things. When using Google Analytics it’s really easy to get lost in all the data, but sometimes it’s necessary to take the time and see what information they have to offer about your account. In this blog post I’ll discuss 4 very cool and useful Google Analytics reports that I use frequently to boost my PPC campaigns’ performance.

1. Site Overlay – Find out where users are clicking on your landing page

The site overlay tool, located under the “Content” section of Analytics shows you where people are actually clicking on your landing page. This is a feature that a lot of expensive analytics programs have, so having it to use for free is awesome!

This tool shows you the percentages of users that clicked on a particular image, promo, banner or tab of your homepage or landing page.

How it helps PPC is that you can find out what is most popular or most intriguing to your users from your landing page. If you find that a particular product is getting a majority of clicks then perhaps you should increase bids on that keyword or ad an ad group for that product in particular if you don’t have one already.

2. Geographical Reporting by Source – Find out where around the country, region or city users are searching your keywords.

In Google Analytics you can sort your reports by country, region or by city. This is great because you can determine where a majority of your traffic is coming from. How this can help your PPC account? If a majority of your traffic is coming from one or two locations, you can easily create a new landing page and direct people just from these locations to a more targeted and specific landing page that will cater more to their needs.

For example, I found in one of my travel accounts that a majority of my visitors were coming from the Florida area. Therefore, I created a new landing page that specifically spoke to Florida residents telling them where the best and closest places were to travel near Florida and the best way to get there. This can help improve conversions, bounce rate, time spent on site and customer retention.

To view this report simply go to ‘all traffic sources’, then click on any source medium. There is a drop down menu directly above the sources of traffic, and in that drop down you have the option to choose country, region or city.

3. Content, Top Landing Pages & Top Exit Pages – See what pages your users find to be most important or intriguing to them.

Under the content section, the top landing and exit pages reports are cool in that they show you which landing pages users find most important or most unappealing.

The top landing and exit pages are listed by URL and ranked by the number of entrances, (people coming to your landing page). It also gives you information like number of bounces for each landing page and bounce rate. This can tell you that perhaps your keywords you have in your PPC account aren’t jiving with what the user thinks they’re going to get, therefore they leave the site. With pages that have higher bounce rates you can update the landing page and gear it more towards what users are searching for. This could dramatically help with customer loyalty and conversion rates in your PPC account.

There are many more very helpful reports within Google Analytics. It’s a matter of getting in there and digging around a bit.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Advanced PPC Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.