How to Be A Flippin AdWords Ninja with Only Google Tools
By: Bill Su
Tags: Small Business, Marketing, Google Analytics, Analytics, Digital Marketing

How to Be A Flippin AdWords Ninja with Only Google Tools

Part 2: Optimize and Monitor Your Campaign to Perfection

Welcome back to your AdWords Ninja training.

Before we begin, let’s recap what we have covered last week.

There are 3 tools that can help you with the “keyword research” phase of your AdWords workflow:

Google Trends can help you shape your overall keyword strategy by identifying trending topics and keywords on Google. Google Search Console can help you understand which keywords your website visitors are organically searching for, and further expand your portfolio of keywords and topics. Adwords’ Keyword Planner can help you further expand your keyword portfolio based on your website and industry. It can also help you determine the competitiveness, popularity, and estimated cost of each keyword to help you select a final group of keywords based on your budget.

After finalizing your keywords, adgroups, and campaigns with assistance from the three tools above, you are now ready to start your campaign.

While choosing the correct ad group and keyword is a very important factor in determining the eventual success of your AdWords campaign, it is only the beginning.

In order for your campaigns to achieve the highest return on investment possible, you need to consistently monitor and optimize it.

By optimization, we mean the act of rapidly removing ineffective keywords, and redirecting your marketing spend to back the few “winners” that gain real traction.

Here is where combining Adwords with other Google tools can really help you effectively monitor and optimize your campaign. In this article, I will show you how to use other Google tools to

Obtain a better understanding of what keywords, ad copies, adgroups, and campaigns are working and why (Google Analytics) Optimize your campaign beyond search ads (Google Optimize) Combine all data sources in your organization to track the full impact of your Adwords campaign (Google Data Studio)

With these tools, you’ll not only be able to make sure that your campaign is running at its fullest potential, but you’ll also come to understand the full business impact your AdWords campaigns have.

Use Google Analytics to Better Understand All Aspects of Your Campaign

While Google AdWords already provides you with plenty of data for monitoring and optimization, combining this data with Google Analytics can take your analysis to a new level.

More specifically, using these two platforms in conjunction can tell you not only whether or not a specific keyword is working but also why it is working. This will allow you to replicate its success in the future.

To illustrate this point further, here is a list of metrics that can be used for keyword/adgroup optimization if you are using only Adwords:

Click Through Rate (Clicks / Impression)

Quality Score

Avg. Position

Cost Per Click

Conversion Rate (Requires setup)

Most of these metrics (besides Conversion Rate) reflect the immediate results of your advertisement such as its popularity and the amount of clicks that it directed to your website. However, they don’t do a good job of telling you who the visitors actually are or how they behave after they visit your website.

By integrating AdWords with Google Analytics, you can vastly expand the amount of data available to you and use it to track your visitors from the moment they click on your Ads until they either exit your site or convert.

More specifically, Google Analytics can offer data such as:

The demographic composition, location, gender, and age of the users that come through each keyword, ad group, campaign, or ad copy.

The avg. duration of the visits, the number of pages visited, and the user flow of those users that come through each specific keyword, ad group, campaign, or ad copy.

The conversion rate of each specific keyword, ad group, campaign, or ad copy, along with the data related to the value of each conversion (direct value for e-commerce purchases, indirect value otherwise).

As you can see, the data offered by Google Analytics is far more comprehensive than that provided by AdWords.

While combining your Google Analytics and Adwords workflows may cost you time, understanding the detailed behavior of your users as they utilize each keyword will not only help you better optimize your campaigns, but also aid you in understands the behavior of your target audiences so that you can be more accurate in future campaigns.

For more information about using Google Analytics with Adwords, please reference the blog post below

Use Google Optimize for Landing Page Optimization

Now let’s shift to optimization activities themselves.

In AdWords, you can optimize your campaign in the following two ways:

Keyword Optimization: Pause or adjust the budgets of ad groups or keywords based on performance

Pause or adjust the budgets of ad groups or keywords based on performance Ad Copy Optimization: Adjust the content of ad copies along with the web pages they link to.

While we could write a series of articles on how to perfectly optimize these two aspects of your Adwords campaign perfecting them usually isn’t quite enough in the drive to fully optimize your Adwords campaign.

This is because, when calculating the rank and bid of your advertisement, Google also take into account the landing page experience of your users. That’s why it is important to also optimize your landing pages for the best bid and placement for each of your keywords.

While you can adjust the landing page experience of your users by changing the web pages your Ad Copy links to, in many instances you need to change the pages themselves in order to make them more attractive, sticky and trustworthy for your visitors.

Using Google Optimize, you can conduct A/B testing on your landing pages and identify the page version that yields a lower bounce rate, higher engagement, improves your prospects for conversion, and lowers the bid of your keywords.

Recently, Google integrated Google Optimize into the Google Adwords platform, making it easier than ever to use Google Optimize for your Adwords campaign. Read more at the link below.

Finally, in addition to optimizing the landing page experience, you can also Google Analytics and Google Optimize to identify the weaknesses in your users’ conversion funnel. You can then patch these weaknesses in order to improve the conversion rate of your website and thus help you reap the most benefit possible from your AdWords campaign.

For a more detailed discussion on how to do this, please refer to the blog post below.

Use Google Data Studio for Data Monitoring Across Your Organization

Now, let’s talk about monitoring.

As you may have already realized, monitoring and optimizing Google Analytics campaigns requires you to access and monitor data from multiple platforms simultaneously before communicating those findings with your entire team.

While Google is trying its best to integrate as many tools as possible, monitoring AdWords campaigns remains one of the most labor intensive activities out there.

For this reason, Google introduced Google Data Studio to make data communication and monitoring easier for all of us.

In short, Google Data Studio is a free dashboard tool that helps you integrate data from multiple Google and non-Google data sources so that you can conduct analysis on that data and convert format it with easy-to-use dashboard that allow you to easily communicate information with your team.

Google Data Studio automatically integrates with Google data-sources such as Google Analytics and Google Adwords, but you can also input your organization sales data into the platform if you want to track the impact of your campaigns at a deeper level.

An example of a dashboard in Google Data Studio is linked below to give you a brief idea of what the tool has to offer.

To learn more about Google Data Studio, please reference the link provided below: