"Let stay together, baby."

In today’s post, which is our third installment of this week’s PPC Love Series, I will be telling a tattered tale of heartbreak that has occurred over trying to use AdWords and Anlytics reporting separately for eCommerce clients. Fortunately this story has a happy ending, one that would keep Cupid himself aflutter. In the words of Al Green, “Times are good or bad, happy or sad…” My aim with this post is to make them more good/happy and to show you that you can use both AdWords and Analytics reports in harmony.

My biggest challenge in managing PPC accounts for eCommerce clients has been not being able to see revenue data in Google AdWords. Conversions and conversion tracking really don’t do me much good because my clients’ products have different values, so I can’t assign specific values to conversions. Of course, my keyword revenue data is available in Analytics, but I can only add one secondary dimension at a time to drill down this information, choosing either match type, campaign OR ad group. This isn’t entirely useful if I want to do bid changes that factor in revenue or ROI, as I need to have a complete data set to upload changes into AdWords.

Because I love you, I have found a work around, and I am happy to share it today with you. It’s fairly easy, and it’s worth the extra few minutes you’ll spend compiling your reports in the long haul. Combining your AdWords metrics with your Analytics data will allow you to analyze your PPC campaign on many new levels. You’ll never look back! I will stop keeping you in suspense about this newly defined, revamped relationship between your AdWords and Analytics reports. Consider them turned around and made up (thanks, Al!).

In this post I’ll be detailing how to pull together a keyword report with revenue data, but you could apply this to any account level (campaign, ad group, keyword). So, without further ado, let the reporting honeymoon begin.

Step 1 – Analytics Custom Report

Build the report you want in Analytics. All your AdWords data (clicks, impressions, cost, etc.) is actually available to you in Analytics (assuming your account is linked to Analytics), you just might not know where/how to access it. The easiest way to get all the information you want in the same place is to create a custom report.

On the custom report tab, click the button at the top of your screen to create a new custom report. You’ll want to make sure that you’re creating an Explorer report, and not a Flat Table report, because you’ll be segmenting your data further once it’s created.

Since I’m only interested in Google data for this report, I made sure to filter this report accordingly:

Essentially, you just want to recreate the metrics available to you in AdWords in Analytics. Not all metrics are available, but the key ones are. Here’s the final structure of my custom report:

If you need more information about creating custom reports in Analytics, check out Google’s Quick Start Guide.

Step 2 – Export Your Data From Analytics

Okay, this is the only part of this process that can be a little labor intensive if you have a lot of keywords in your account. After you’ve created your report, run it and make sure you’ve set your view to show the maximum number of entries on your screen, 500 (you can change this at the bottom of your report in a small drop down menu). Then go to the top of your screen and click Export, then choose CSV as your file type.

Frustratingly enough, Analytics will only export the data that is shown on your screen, so you’ll have to dump your keyword data into your report 500 keywords at a time. I just created one report and copied and pasted all subsequent exports into my original. Keep things easy for yourself and don’t edit your columns until after you’ve dumped in all your keywords.

Step 3 – Reformat Keywords

To prime your report to merge with the data you’ll be pulling out of AdWords, you’ll need to format your keywords like the appear in AdWords with the keyword identifiers for each match type (“phrase”, [exact]). The fastest way to do this is to sort your keywords by match type, then use a blank worksheet to edit. Copy and paste keywords one match type at a time onto your blank worksheet and use the concatenate function in Excel to put parentheses or brackets around your keywords.

Copy your concatenated list and paste back into your original report to overwrite the keywords in your keyword column, but make sure you use Paste Special – Values to only copy in text. Otherwise you’ll paste in your formula, which won’t work since your original data is on another sheet.

Here’s what my Analytics report looked like when I was finished:

Step 3 – AdWords

Head into AdWords, and download a keyword report. Make sure your keyword match type is included in the data you export, and also make sure you’ve run the exact date range you used in your Analytics report. Clean up your report by getting rid of getting rid of data you don’t need. In this example, I got rid of all paused keywords, since I’m looking to make bid changes on active keywords, and then I deleted my status column. When this was all said and done, here’s what my report looked like:

Copy or move this worksheet into the same Excel file that houses your Analytics sheet.

Step 4 – Combine and Be Amazed

Now it’s time to combine your AdWords and Analytics reports to have campaign, ad group AND revenue/ROI data for each keyword! To do this, go back to your Analytics sheet and add in columns for the missing AdWords data you want to add. Make sure that you add the columns in the same order that they appear on your AdWords report. You’ll need the columns to be in the same place because you’ll be referencing data by column number.

A brief note, the CPC shown on your Analytics report is actually your keyword’s avg. CPC, and not your max CPC. I just changed the column title, and then set up my report to pull in the max CPC from my AdWords sheet. So, I added three columns (campaign, ad group, max CPC) where they appear in my AdWords report:

To make the real magic happen, we’ll be using the VLOOKUP function in Excel. After you’ve created your campaign, ad group and max CPC columns, click in the first cell of your campaign column. The VLOOKUP function will match data from another table based on your leftmost column. If you’re not well versed in Excel functions, just use the Formula Builder in Excel to plug in the correct data. To get to the Formula Builder, go to the Insert menu at the top of your screen and choose Function. Double click VLOOKUP and you’ll get this box:

Basically, you’ll just need to tell Excel which cell to try to match (lookup_value), which will be the data in your first column, the range of data to use to match from, the number column of the data you want to display (in this case, campaign, which is column 3). You’ll want to use FALSE as the range_lookup, which will tell Excel to match your keyword value exactly. This is why I had you format your keywords in the same way they’re shown in AdWords.

Don’t worry if you’re not an Excel wizard. I used this help topic from Microsoft when I first started doing this, and found it to be more than adequate to get me started: VLOOKUP.

Copy your formula down to all rows in your Campaign column. To populate your Ad group and Max CPC columns, simply copy the formula in your campaign column, paste into each subsequent colomn, and then change the the column index number for each column (4 and 5 in this example). Congrats! You’ve merged your reports. Just a one more small thing to do…

Step 5 – One Last thing…

To make your new, combined report workable, you’ll just want to copy and paste your report onto a new sheet to get rid of the formulas. This will make tweaking your data possible, like using the report to do bid changes. To do this, just copy all rows, columns, create a new worksheet and paste as values (Paste Special – Values).

Just a brief note, I wouldn’t recommend trying to do this backwards by pulling data via the VLOOKUP function into your AdWords sheet data. Why? You might have keywords in AdWords that have not generated data in Analytics yet.

I hope this post will help you find the love that exists between your Analytics and AdWords reports. If you give it a try, let us know in the comments below.

Check back tomorrow for Kayla’s final post in our series, Hopelessly Devoted To Revenue!

In this guide you’ll learn:

• What URL tracking is
• Why you should be tagging all of your destination URLs
• The types of Analytics URL tagging
• How to track outside PPC data in analytics (Bing, Facebook, etc.)
• Other uses for URL tagging and tracking

What is does: Turns the character following the backslash into plain text.

How it works:

Say you want to create a goal for the url /thankyou?id=123. In Regex, “?” has another meaning, which we’ll get to in a little bit, but we need it to be plain text since it is part of the url string. To do that, we place a backslash before the ? to tell Analytics to treat it as plain text.

/thankyou\?id=123

What it does: Creates an “or” statement.

a|b will match a or b

How it works:

Let’s say you want to find all visits from branded terms for PPC Hero. You can create a custom filter setting a regular expression for all brand keywords.

ppc hero|ppchero

All terms containing ppchero or ppc hero will be returned.

What it does: Tells Analytics that the previous item is optional.

ab?c will match ac or abc

How it works:

This expression comes in handy when you are filtering for keywords that are commonly misspelled. I want to find all visits to our site that contain the term “heroes,” which is often misspelled as “heros.”

heroe?s

This will catch keywords that contain either “heros” or “heroes.”

What it does: Tells other regex characters how to function. Works the same way as in math.

2 + 3 x 5 = 17                                         (2+3) x 5 = 25

How it works:

You’ll most often see parentheses working in conjunction with pipe bars. I want to all the searches for Google Display Network. I know people also refer to it as the Google Content Network and I want to include both searches in my results. Without the parentheses, Analytics would return anything containing “Google Content” or “Display Network.”

Google (Display|Content) Network

By including parentheses, this Regex will return anything containing “google content network” or “google display network.”

What they do: Create a list of items to match to. The regular expression will only match ONE item in this list.

p[aiu] will match pan, pin, pun but NOT pain

How it’s used:

I’m interested in how many click to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th pages when they come to our blog. The url for each page x on the blog is /page/x. To find pages 2, 3 and 4 I would set my expression as follows:

/page/[234]

Before we see what the results look like in Analytics, I want to introduce you to the next regex character which helps in creating lists.

What it does: Works with brackets to extend lists.

• [a-z] matches all lower case letters in the alphabet
• [A-Z] matches all upper case letters in the alphabet
• [a-zA-Z0-9] matches lower and upper case letters and digits

How it works:

Lets use the same example above. Using a dash in my regular expression, I can quickly include more page numbers for it to match to without having to type them all out.

/page/[2-9]

This will return any page which url ends in /page/2 through /page/9.

Looking at these results, you might be wondering about two things. What happens when you want to view pages higher than 9 and how do you keep regex from including the category pages. Those questions will be answered as we continue to get to know the rest of the Regex characters.

What they do:Braces tell Analytics to repeat the last piece of information a certain number of times.

Braces can be used with one or two numbers.

This will pull all urls that end in page/1 through page/99.

What it does: A dot matches ANY one character. Characters include letters, numbers and symbols. A dot even matches a whitespace.

a.c will match “abc”, “adc”, “a$c”, “a c” ,etc. It won’t match “ac” because there is no character between a and c.

How it works:

Truth be told, I really don’t use just the dot in analytics much. Even so, it’s still important to know how it functions so you set up your regular expressions correctly.

If I want to see all keywords for which someone included “.com” and I don’t use \ to remove the regex function of the dot, will find anything that has any character before “com.” Look at the difference in results below when .com is used with and without the \.

What it does: A plus sign matches one or more of the previous items, and only the previous items.

a+bc will match abc, aabc, aaabc but not bc.

You can also use lists with plus signs to match more than just one previous item.

[abc]+ wil match a, ab, abc,  acb, c, b, bbbbbbb, etc.

How it works:

Going back to the page number example, we can use + instead of { } to match to pages above 9.

What it does: A star matches zero or more of the previous items. Similar to plus signs except they allow you to match ZERO or more of the previous items (plus signs require at least one match).

a*bc will match abc, aabc, aaabc AND bc.

How it works:

Let’s take the example above. This would only match to page urls that have some number after them. If I use a star, it will match all urls that end in page/ with or without a number after it.

What it does: These two regular expressions put together mean “get everything.”

How it works:

If I want to compare visits for the 2^nd page of every piece of content on my site I can set up my regular expression as .*/page/2/.* to catch every 2^nd page url on my site.

What it does: When you use a caret in your RegEx you force the Expression to match only strings that start exactly the way your RegEx does.

^abc will match ab, a, abc but not bc

How it works:

Let’s revisit my earlier task of wanting to see all the pages in my main blog feed past page 1. Remember, I was getting category pages and not just main pages. Placing the carat at the beginning of my string can solve this problem.

^/page/[1-9]*

What it does: Indicates the end of the string. It tell Analytics not to match any target string that has any characters beyond where I have placed the dollar sign in my Regular Expression.

abc$ will match abc, bc but not abcd

How it works:

Finally we have all of the characters necessary to create an expression that only shows the different pages of the main blog.

Understanding how to use these regular expressions will help you quickly find the information you are looking for in your Analytics account. If you have any questions or comments please post below!

I actually first noticed Real Time when I was setting up GA on a personal blog.  It’s a great way to see how your tracking is working right off the bat.  At first, after I placed the Analytics code on the page, the system wasn’t registering that it was working, but I could actually see myself on the page with this real time tool, and could watch it following me around based on what active page I was viewing at the time.  Therefore, I advise you to have some time on your hands before you dive in, because Real-Time is kind of addicting to explore.

The Layout

Where can you find real-time?  First, if you’re using the new version of Google Analytics, you need to be on the Home tab.  If you’re not using the new version, you should be able to toggle over to it from the old version and vice versa.

Real-Time Tabs

Overview Tab:

The Overview tab gives you a count of visitors that are currently active on your website, and what percentage of those are new versus returning users.   In addition, you have the option to view page views per second or per minute.  As the pageviews roll in over a 60 second time frame, they are attributed to your per minute account (the graph on the left hand side under pageviews) and recorded per minute for 30 minutes so that you can have a bit of time to analyze data before it disappears from Real-Time.

In addition, you can see a log of pageviews for the past 30 minutes, where you can see where your site received the most visits after a certain event.  According to the blog post released on Blogspot, this tool can be used to review your social efforts in connection with site visitors.  For instance, if you see greater spikes in a 30 minute window compared to the rest of the day, like in the image below, you can track it back to something that you perhaps Tweeted or somebody retweeted for you and better understand what sort of content your visitors like to see from you.

Locations Tab

The locations tab breaks down the amount of visitors on your website from different countries at different times, and hey, if you want, you can even opt in to using Google earth to show you where on the globe your visitors are coming from, however, all this really seems to do is make me dizzy as it is constantly updating itself to follow your visitors – so I’m going to keep it simple at the map view.

Traffic Sources Tab

The Traffic Sources section gives you a live breakdown of where each visitor came from (medium and source) and how many of those active visitors came from that area.  In this client example below, you can see that the majority of the visitors are direct traffic, and which ones are visiting organically (and from which search engine) or through paid search (CPC).

If you click through to one of these segments, you can see additional information. In the example below, I’ve clicked through to a CPC segment, and it shows you which keywords your current visitors have come in on.  You can do this similarly with organic or referral to see where your visitors are finding you.

Content Tab

The content tab gives you which pages on your website are currently being viewed.  You can also see which pages were active in the past 30 minutes and how many page views they received, and of course, you can break down those pages to see where they came from. In this case, we have 8 direct visits and 1 visit from the organic Google search results.

I’m really excited about Real-Time and I think it’s a great step for Google Analytics.  In addition, I’ve noticed a lot of folks commenting on what they’re using Real-Time to analyze on their websites and what sort of decisions they’re making with the tool.  I’ve also read about people abandoning their current real time solutions in favor of the free Analytics tool.  I think that Google has some things they could add in the future to make this tool even better, like greater social clarity and more in-depth information on paid search contributions.  What do you think about Real-Time?

I’m calling these less utilized metrics “Random,” because they are statistics that you may not monitor on a consistent basis, and you may not even know how to use them. I’m a firm believer that if you can track it, you can optimize with it. So let’s talk about some ways to use theses random metrics in Google Analytics to create deliberate results.

Content => Site Speed

A few months ago the Analytics team announced that they had added a report to help track page load time. The only problem was, you had to create and implement a new tracking code. They have now, after many requests I am sure, updated this report so you no longer need to add that new code.

Here’s what the report looks like:

If you have a long load time, reducing it will help improve results in a few ways. One is that it should help your quality score. We all know this will help you win more auctions at a lower cost. You will also reduce your bounce rates because people will find what they are looking for faster and stick around. More people sticking around, should lead to more conversions.

Traffic Sources => Sources => Referrals

Some of you will already be watching this closely. For example, an affiliate marketer will get most of their traffic via this source. Others, those who get most of their traffic through PPC, may overlook this metric.

It tells you where your visitors when they found a link to you. If you have a referral source that provides a high percent of your traffic you may want to reach out to them about advertising on their site. Or maybe they have written a blog post about you and should make sure to thank them. Here’s an example of this report:

It also tells you how many people are coming from Twitter and Facebook. This tells you if your social marketing efforts are working, or if you need to reevaluate your strategy. And thanks to Twitters t.co link shortening service, you know can use this report to track down the exact tweet that generated traffic for you.

Mobile => Devices – Ecommerce Segment

Mobile Devices is a relatively new report, and one that is likely to get more tweaks as Mobile becomes a larger and larger portion of paid search revenue for Google. This particular report will tell you how much revenue you generate from all Mobile Devices that hits your site. The following example is from a lead gen client, because we don’t post our clients revenue numbers, but it gives you an idea of what it will look like for an Ecommerce site.

You can use this report to exclude mobile devices that drive a lot of traffic but little revenue from your PPC campaigns. Or if you have a device that performs well, you can create specific campaigns and landing pages that target those users and will increase traffic/conversions from them.

What random metrics do you measure in Analytics to create deliberate results?

One of the most important take-aways from this session was when Ashish talked about making sure you take the time to understand what you want from your website and your analytics account. Why would you or anyone else implement Google Analytics if you really don’t know what you want?  Take your time when figuring out what you want from your site.  In google Analytics you can track pretty much anything you want to on your site.

When you track more on your site you will have a lot more fun diving into Google Analytics.  You can know more what is going on with your traffic and visitors to your site.  Below are some of the newer features you can see through the New Google Analytics Interface.

• Google announced that email scheduling and PDF export functionality are coming to the new interface in the next couple weeks and will be sunsetted in January 2012.  All currently scheduled emails will need to be set up in the new interface over the next two months.  All old interface scheduled emails will be deleted.
• You can now attribute your Facebook ads and track conversions through Google Analytics
• If you have a members area, now you can track how members interact with the site even when they aren’t logged in.  You can even see how often people click on your ads.
• Starting this week anyone putting up mobile ads will start to see mobile ad performance metrics in Google Analytics. A new visual toggle is being added to all AdWords reports, showing “All”, “High-end Mobile” and “Tablet” ads.  I would recommend that you put up separate campaigns for both search on computer and mobile ads.
• Custom Variables, now you can identify previous purchasers to help you maximize return on investment.
• Annotations are very powerful but easy to miss.  When you notice something on your account, you should annotate the change or what’s going on to save you time and grief in the future.
• Implement site search to see if you’re missing content.  This will help you to see content that you’re missing.

Keep in mind, if you need help or have something that you need in Google Analytics you can go and suggest them at http://goo.gl/5BjQS Make sure that you mention that you were here at PubCon and they will give you a little more extra attention!

1. Am I making money or losing money with PPC?

Tracking revenue and expenses is easy to do with Analytics.  If your web site does ecommerce, analytics ecommerce tracking gives you precise data on both AdWords spend and revenue.

If you do lead generation, you can use “Goals” in analytics to determine revenue by affixing an average revenue amount per lead. Of course some leads are more valuable than others. But if you know that it takes you ten lead leads to get a sale, and a sale is worth $1,000, then a lead, on average, is worth $100 (1,000/10). You then set up a goal in analytics that says a lead conversion is worth $100 to you.

Once you have either of these methods set up, you can set up a widget in your analytics dashboard that sums your revenue for any date period, and another that sums what you spent in Google. Compare the two numbers and make sure you’re generating an acceptable return on ad spend.

2. Does anyone use my “Search Box”? What for?

The search terms your users are using will tell you if you are missing important content on your pages. It will also tell you if you are sending irrelevant traffic to your site. Knowing this allows you to trim your keyword list, and/or add new content to your site that people are searching for. Scroll down to the second half of this post to learn how to start tracking these internal searches.

3. Does the “top of funnel” traffic I send through display network campaigns eventually turn into sales at an acceptable ROI?

Multi-Channel funnels will tell you your top conversion paths. This will show if you have a campaign that might not directly generate a lot of conversions, but leads to a second search, either organic or paid, that does convert. You’ll likely find that many of your Display campaigns help drive conversion beyond the first time a user clicks your ad. Check out this PPC Hero post on Multi-Channel Funnels for more information.

4. Should I worry about all this Location Targeting hubbub?

Google announced changes to their Location Targeting feature in the AdWords interface. This update came along with a claim that CPC has been reduced by as much as 36% when campaigns utilize geo-targeting. Does this mean Location Targeting is something you should be doing?

The answer to this question depends on your goals, and if you have any locations that drive you exceptionally qualified traffic or atypically underperforming traffic. To determine if you have any locations that you should specifically target or exclude, access location information on your visitors in Analytics. Simply log into your Analytics and go to “Visitors => Demographics => Location”. You can then select the specific country you want to analyze. A list of “Regions” will show next (which will be States in the U.S.)

At this point I start comparing states to see if any pull in a disproportionate amount of sales/traffic, based upon my goals. If some states perform much better than my goals, I like to create campaigns in AdWords that specifically target them. And if any locations bring in large amounts of traffic but have a poor CPL/CPA I might consider excluding them. Or creating a new campaign targeting that location only and adjusting bids in an attempt to bring my metrics into alignment with my goals.

What is the top question you use Google Analytics to answer?

Attachmedia has created an infographic that describes each of the parameters generated by the Analytics cookies. It’s a useful guide to understanding all the ingredients that go into a GA cookie.

Infographic by Attachmedia

Google Analytics

Quick Guide to Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels

Dealing with Google AdWords and Analytics Data Discrepancies

Heroview – CRO & Analytics for PPC with James Svoboda

Creating Custom Reports in Google Analytics

Our Guide to Google Analytics IQ Testing: Series

The Display Network

How to Succeed on the Display Network: Series

Rob’s #1 Tip for the Google Display Network: Scale Your Campaigns

Heroview – Unveiling Display Network and ACE Tactics with Melissa Mackey

Remarketing

Adwords Remarketing Success

Remarketing Success & Advanced Strategies

Quality Score

The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords Quality Score

Understanding adCenter’s Quality Score: Video

5 Tips to Improve Quality Score: Video

Comparing Quality Score Across AdWords & AdCenter

Case Study: Improving Low Quality Score Accounts

Mobile

10 Mobile Landing Page Best Practices

Why All Your Accounts Should be Running Mobile Campaigns

Are You Sure You’re Optimized for PPC Mobile?

Bid/Budget Management

Managing A __________ PPC Account: Series

AdCenter’s Explicit and Implicit Bidding: Video

Strategies for Campaigns on Smaller Budgets

Using Top vs. Side Ad Segmentation to Make Bidding Decisions

AdWords CPA Bidding Basics and Best Practices

Bidding Strategies: Video

If you’re looking for more information about a topic not listed in this post – never fear, PPC Hero is here! (sorry, I had to…). Just head to the red “Categories” tab at the top of our blog!

How Important is Knowing Tracking Everything?

Now I know what you’re thinking, that’s a ton of money per click.  We’re spending thousands a day on PPC for this particular client and only getting around 100-150 clicks a day.  When you’re paying this much for a click and you want to prove to your employee or client that you’re making money, you really need to make sure that you’re tracking everything.  For this client we are tracing everything the person is doing beyond the click.  If I pay $15 per click you better believe that I’m tracking everything.  I don’t care if the person is going to the contact form, downloading a PDF, or bouncing from the page.  You need to know everything that’s happening with that person.  I even demand that I have a separate 1800 number so I can know if the person is calling.  This will help you to know everything that is happening with your account even outside the website.  Our last campaign we spend $13,000 and didn’t have 1 conversion but found out that we had over 120 calls that resulted in around 15 sales.  This made the whole campaign worth it.  Had we not set up that extra number we would have never known all those people were calling.

How Do I track It?

If you haven’t used Google Analytics, you really need to re-evaluate your life in PPC.  If you need help installing Google Analytics or getting to know anything there is to know about Analytics you should follow this link.  This will give you every article we have about it on our blog.  Install it, get to  know it, and use it everyday.  Know where your clickers are going, what they are doing, and improve your results based on what you see.  I would also say that you have a landing page with a different 1800 number.  You can’t track people calling through Google Analytics but you should be able too with any different 1800 number service.

Landing Pages are Key

The landing page you are having them go to initially are very important to your success.  If you’re paying $15 per click you shouldn’t be landing people on your front and main page.  You need to be landing them on a landing page.  I would recommend that you are always testing two landing pages at a time.  I would give each landing page around 500-1000 clicks before you write off a page.  This can take a while at $15/click.  I always try and give away something free on the page that will give people a lot of value.  A free ebook, coupon, or something else that will help them.  For example, we give away an ebook about the “top ten hosting mistakes” that will help people even if they don’t purchase your product.  Your goal should be to sell, but if you don’t sell, you should always help.  If you help someone, they will begin to trust you.  If a person trusts you, they will come back to you when they need services.

Knowing what’s going on “beyond the click” will help you to impress your client, know what’s going on with your PPC account and help you to better know what to do in the future.  If you can know a little better your metrics, you will have a little bit more of an edge above your competitors than you have before!  Would love to know what other things you have and metrics you’re tracking beyond the click.  Leave your comments below.

<a rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/112003488454981569114/posts"