Data between these two ‘buddies’ who we just got talking by linking them together flows both ways—from AdWords to Analytics (e.g. AdWord costs) and from Analytics to AdWords (e.g. engagement). As this is an AdWords guide, we’re particularly interested in the latter.
Six Steps To See Analytics Data in AdWords Reports
Despite the accounts being linked, there are a few more steps to accomplish before you see the Analytics data in your AdWords reports. No one said life is going to be easy, but it definitely won’t be very hard either!
- Go to your AdWords page and select Account Settings by clicking the gear icon.
- Select Linked Accounts.
- Choose up to ten Google Analytics views you want to import data from by clicking Add to the right of the view name.
- Go to the Campaigns page of your AdWords and click on the Columns button.
- Select Modify Columns from the drop-down menu and locate Google Analytics on the left of side of the column customization menu.
- Click Add for each column you’d like to be able to see and click Apply.
Advanced User Attention!
If you’ve noticed discrepancies between the data presented in your AdWords and Analytics accounts, that’s because these two Google products differ as to how they measure certain parameters and report data. Google Support has got a handy dandy checklist to eliminate any data discrepancies due to improper configuration of your account.
The Types of Analytics Engagement Metrics You Can Now See
If everything went according to plan, you should now be able to see various engagement metrics featured next to your AdWords performance statistics. More specifically, you can spy on what people do after they get to your landing page via your ad:
- Bounce rate—a flashy way of saying that the person visited just one page or triggered only one event and left your site without navigating further through the site i.e. viewed the one page only and left. Note that these users either found your site irrelevant to what they were looking for on Google search, or weren’t quite impressed with your offerings;
- Average session duration—the average time someone spent on your site in one session;
- Pages per session—how many pages are typically visited in one user session;
- Percentage of new sessions—first time visitors to your site.
As you can see, that’s some pretty important information when it comes to making decisions about managing your ad campaigns successfully and profitably. Let us create a fictional example of how this data might help. We promise—no more antique fishing lures!
EXAMPLE
Lucy runs a graphic design business and being the great businesswoman that she is, she’s investigating which AdWords work the best to get her more work in designing wedding invitations. She’s got multiple campaigns running, but has zeroed in on two particular ones that seem to get the highest CTR: ‘wedding invitation design‘ and ‘bespoke wedding invitations’. For the sake of this exercise, let’s keep the number of impressions even.
| Ad Group Theme | Impressions | CTR | Bounce rate | Average session duration | Pages per session | Percentage of new sessions |
| Wedding invitation design | 1,000 | 15% | 57% | 0.15 minutes | 1 | 97% |
| Bespoke wedding invitations | 1,000 | 8% | 25% | 2.12 minutes | 6 | 78% |
Quick Reminder
CTR stands for click-through rate is the proportion of people who click on your ad to the total number of people who see it.
First things first, if Lucy hadn’t linked her Google AdWords and Analytics together, she wouldn’t have been able to see a lot of important data. And what a detriment to her business it would’ve been: looking at just the impressions and the CTR, she might have thought that ad group ‘wedding invitation design’ is getting more than double the clicks when compared to ‘bespoke wedding invitations’.
Yet, when we add the Google Analytics data into the mix, a much more accurate picture emerges.
Just from the bounce rate, it’s pretty clear that ‘bespoke wedding invitations’ is the winner. Perhaps people looking for ‘wedding invitation design’ intend to create their own invitation or they’re looking to learn about wedding invitation design and gain it as a skill, both of which would make Lucy’s graphic design service unnecessary to them. Thus, the high bounce rate.
Similarly, the average session duration is drastically smaller for ‘wedding invitation design’, because that particular AdWord group can be unsuitable for Lucy’s type of business. Instead, modern engaged couples (let’s be honest—engaged brides-to-be) are looking for ‘bespoke wedding invitations’ when searching for someone to design an invitation to the best day of their lives.
The pages per session metric indicates that just the landing page is visited when someone clicks on ‘wedding invitation design’, clearly indicating that Lucy’s page isn’t what they were looking for. Meanwhile, an average of six pages are visited by people looking for ‘bespoke wedding invitations’. Perhaps they browse through the landing page, then go on to read about Lucy, look into her portfolio and the price list, get her contact details off the Contact Me page and/or send Lucy a request for a quote.
Lastly, the percentage of new sessions for the financially unsuccessful ‘wedding invitation design’ theme indicates that nearly all visitors are new ones, i.e. hardly anyone returns to her site. On the contrary, 22% of ‘bespoke wedding invitations’ visitors are coming back to the site for the second (or the third, fourth, et cetera) time. Perhaps they liked what they saw and are coming to the site again to show it to their fiancée to see if they can agree on booking Lucy.
