Learn how to read your Google AdWords Campaign Reports

Google Analytics is an unbelievably great tool for evaluating all the traffic coming in to your website and it can supply you with a colossal (and often baffling) amount of detail that can help you to re-work the design of your site to gain more visitors, and drive them to the areas of your site that you want them to go.

When you work out the various different levels of information available in Google Analytics it can provide you with some very important information. When you are using Google AdWords, one thing you shouldn't forget is that every click is costing you money!

Here's a short guide on how to appreciate a Google AdWords Campaign Report:

To begin with - Your AdWords Campaign Reports

You need to find all of your AdWords-related information in Google Analytics, you can do this by going to Traffic Sources > AdWords, this is in the main navigation page.

Google AdWords Campaigns report, which is at the top of the listing, includes performance data for your AdWords keyword ads. This is the top level of a hierarchy of all the other reports.

By clicking on the Campaigns in the table, you will enter into the Ad Groups report, this shows you all of the Ad Groups in that Campaign.

Click on the Ad Groups and you will find the AdWords Keywords report which shows you a list of all the keywords in that particular Ad Group.

The secret key - Clicks Tab

The AdWords Campaigns reports are exclusive in that they provide a very handy tab labelled - Clicks. The Click statistics are rather useful for optimising AdWords spending.

Let‘s have a look at the best three metrics:

Visits – this is the amount of visits to your site arriving specifically from Google AdWords keyword campaigns.
Impressions – this includes the amount of times your ads were shown.
Clicks – this lists the amount of clicks for which you had to pay for and which your ads received.
It is absolutely fine for Visits and Clicks to show completely different numbers. If this happens, it is because you may have fewer Clicks than Visits. This reason this happens is because some visitors clicked on the ad, and then later, during a totally different session, returned straight to the site through a bookmark or other saved link. The data from the original visit was retained, so some clicks resulted in more than one visit.

If you have fewer Visits than Clicks then you may not have installed the Google Analytics Tracking Code and so it may not be working properly on all your landing pages, this needs to be checked. Another thing is that people may click away from your website or stop your landing page from loading before the tracking code was sent. One more thing; your visitors must have JavaScript, images, and cookies enabled on their browsers in order to be tracked. But, Google AdWords is able to register clicks from these visitors, so not all is lost.

Find out - How Many Times were your Google Ads were Displayed?

Impressions, Clicks, Fee, and CTR (Clickthrough Rate) all express how many times your ads appeared and how frequently people clicked on them.

These metrics can help you to comprehend just how obvious and convincing your ads are to people who search for these important keywords.

For example, if you want to improve your clickthrough rate, you might want to consider bidding for a higher position or paraphrase your ad so that it is more relatable to the person who is searching.

If you are getting all zero's in the price column, make sure you have linked to your AdWords account and that you've enabled autotagging, this is vital!

Which Keywords are most Profitable to you?

Revenue per Click, ROI (Return on Investment), and Margin can help you to decide on how profitable your keyword is.

For instance, the ROI is practical because it shows us, with a single-metric comparison, how much you have spent versus how much you have made.

An ROI of 0% means that you earned in revenue the same amount of money you spent.

An ROI of 100% means that you spent, say £1000, and made £2000.

In other words, you spent X and received 2X in revenue.

It's not unusual to get 500% or even 1000% ROI. Having a soaring ROI is simply a gauge to tell you that your Revenue is much larger than your Cost.

If your RPC numbers are all 0 and your ROI numbers are all -100%, it‘s because you have no Revenue.

Don't forget that you have set goal values or that you have authorized e-commerce tracking.