Analytics Boot Camp Day 5, Part 2: Advertising & AdWords

Ahoy, Attendees!

This installment of our Google Analytics (GA) Boot Camp is going to touch briefly upon the Advertising section of Standard Reporting. We find it beneath the Audience section, which we just wrapped up in our last Camp.

Since most of our Black Chicken Host customers are bloggers and not eCommerce sites, we’re not going to spend an inordinate amount of time on this today. Rather, we’ll familiarize you with the terms, provide you with links to helpful documentation, and then move along to Part Three of today’s Camp which will cover our old friend, Traffic Sources.

Within the context of GA, “Advertising” always refers to AdWords – this is Google’s popular paid-for advertising service. Bloggers can advertise their websites, especially if they make a good amount of affiliate or ad income, but most choose not to do so to keep expenses down.

From Google: “The AdWords reports give you post-click performance metrics for your traffic from AdWords. This allows you to see what outcomes occurred as a result of visitors clicking on your AdWords ads.”

The first item under Advertising, AdWords is Campaigns. A “campaigns” is set up within the AdWord interface, and doing that is beyond the scope of this Boot Camp (perhaps another one, someday.) You’ll need to link your Analytics and AdWords accounts, which you can do by following these directions.

There are various metrics, segments, and dimensions we may choose from to scope our data (we actually kept a straight face writing this sentence, believe it or not:)

Let’s quickly touch on some terminology, direct from Google:

Keywords: “This report provides information about visitor behavior (Site Usage), visitor impact on revenue (Ecommerce), and AdWords cost and ROI (Clicks) based on AdWords-keyword traffic to your site.”

Matched Search Queries: “Use the Matched Search Query view to see which searches resulted in a display of your AdWords ads. Insight into exactly how users are searching for your type of product or service gives you an opportunity to refine your keyword list, reach a broader audience, and display your ads more effectively.”

Day Parts: “This report provides information about visitor behavior (Site Usage) and visitor impact on revenue (Ecommerce) based on AdWords traffic to your site during each hour of the day and day of the week” (basically, an hourly breakdown.)

Destination URL’s: “This report provides information about visitor behavior (Site Usage) and visitor impact on revenue (Ecommerce) based on AdWords traffic to the destination URLs in your site.”

Placements: “This report provides information about visitor behavior (Site Usage) and visitor impact on revenue (Ecommerce) based on traffic from domains in the Google Content Network.”

Keyword Positions: “This report provides information about visitor behavior (Site Usage) and visitor impact on revenue (Ecommerce) based on where ads triggered by your keywords appear in Google search-results pages (e.g., top of first page, position in right-hand column of ads).”

TV Ads: “This report lets you see per-campaign statistics for the number of impressions and plays, the number of televisions that were tuned in to the entire ad, the percentage of the audience that watched the ad from start to finish, the cost of the campaign, and the cost of each thousand impressions” (pretty major-league stuff there.)

Google’s Help section on AdWord Campgains can help you utilize the Advertising of Analytics, should you wish to go into more depth and explore AdWords within Analytics.

That’s it for this installment of the Analytics Boot Camp.

We figure you’re as sick of Analytics as we are! However, we’ll continue in a future Camp, starting with Traffic Sources: Learn from where your site’s visitors are coming.



2 thoughts on “Analytics Boot Camp Day 5, Part 2: Advertising & AdWords”

  • Hi,

    Great article but I have a question about the ‘advertising’ section – is it possible to list Adcentre / Bing directly in the menu? For example, listed underneath ‘Adwords’?

    Thanks

    John

    • Hi John – Under which menu would you like Adcentre/Bing listed? I’m sorry, but I’m not quite certain what you’re asking. I’ll be happy to help when you clarify, though! 🙂

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