If you missed it, please do refer to our How to always see Google Adwords keywords in your data guide, as it’s important to have visibility of all those keywords before being able to determine return on investment (ROI).
Google Adwords (Pay Per Click – PPC) often has a bad reputation. Unfortunately, Google make it easy for advertisers to make mistakes, which makes Google rich but damages the perception of how PPC can be useful. When efficiently used and analysed, PPC provides a brilliant return on investment.
One of the purposes of the A1WebStats system is to let you see how every individual person who clicked from a PPC advert then navigated through your website.
Such data will unveil the following:
- PPC clicks that go no further than the page they landed on (including the keyword phrase that triggered the click).
- PPC clicks that resulted in strong interaction with important website pages.
- Opportunities to strengthen your PPC focus.
- Opportunities to strengthen your landing pages and the pages that people then move onto.
Warning: using A1WebStats to dig deeper into what happens with your PPC visitors will often present a miserable picture. However, that then gives you a point from where to make improvements.
Select ‘Referrers’ from the main navigation bar near the top of the page.
Referrers (sources of visitor traffic) data will be shown, based on the date range you have selected.
Within that data you will see (in the ‘Source’ column) ‘Pay-Per-Click (PPC)’. If you do not sure PPC in that column, but you have had clicks during that time period, it could be that your Google Adwords is not fully linked to your Google Analytics. There is a link on the Referrers page that takes you to the process to create that important link that enables A1WebStats to see those PPC clicks.
To filter the view to see only PPC visitors click into the ‘Search Query’ box on the top left of the screen, type ‘PPC’ and then click the ‘Search’ button.
Using the tick boxes on the left, you can now select one or more of the PPC rows shown and click on ‘Create Report’ to create a detailed level view of all the visitors who entered your website from PPC during the selected time period.
However, although you could look through those visitor records one by one, it’s a slow way to analyse ROI from PPC. There is a better way …
Again, from the Dashboard select a date range (using the date picker tool on the top right), within which you’d like to gain an insight into your PPC visitors.
Select ‘Advanced Reports’ after hovering over ‘More Reports’ in the main navigation bar.
Raw data will be shown, based on the date range you have selected.
Within the ‘General Filtering Selection’ part of the screen change the ‘Visit Source’ pulldown so that it displays as ‘Pay-Per-Click (PPC)’.
Now click on the ‘Apply Filter(s)’ button towards the bottom of the General Filtering Selection part of the page.
You will be taken to the bottom of the screen where you will see a line of ‘Total Visitor Records’, showing you the number of records that have been extracted below, covering that date range you chose. These will all be visitors via PPC.
You can now further filter the PPC visitors data so that you gain more insights.
One insight you may want to see is how many of those PPC visitors went no further than the landing page (which often implies poor engagement or PPC visibility that needs to be strengthened). To see this, take a note of the total PPC visitors within the analysis period and then scroll to the top of the screen to the ‘General Filtering Selection’ part of the page. Within that part of the page leave ‘Pages Visited’ as ‘Equals’ but change ‘All Pages’ to ‘1 Page’ and click on ‘Apply Filter(s)’ below.
You will be taken back to the bottom of the screen where you will see a line of ‘Total Visitor Records’, showing you the number of records that have been extracted below, covering that date range you chose.
Now take the number of PPC visitors that went to the landing page only and work it out as a percentage of the total PPC visitors. This data is probably the most important PPC data you can get because it highlights opportunities for improvement. We cover this in more detail within our guide titled How to see which Google Adwords clicks go no further than the landing page.
You may also be interested in those PPC visitors who looked at more than one page and looked at a certain page (or series of pages) during their visit. To do this, scroll back up to the ‘General Filtering Selection’ area at the top of the page to start. Then in the ‘Pages Visited’ part of that area, change ‘Equals’ to ‘Is Greater Than’ and leave the other field as ‘1 Page’.
You don’t have to click on ‘Apply Filter(s)’ yet as you can now enter the visited page of interest.
Scroll down the page to the ‘Visited Path Options’ section.
At this point you can select the page url of interest from the scrolling list and click on ‘Set Any Visited Page 1’ as shown below.
Alternatively you could click into the ‘Any Visited Page 1’ box and type a partial url of interest. The example below shows a partial url of /sectors, which would filter by all people who got to any url containing that.
With any of the PPC visitors data you can click on the ‘Select All’ button and then ‘Create Report’ to see the detail view of each PPC visitor.
At any time that you create a filtered view of the PPC data (for example, those visitors who went to one page only each day), you can then create a daily email by clicking on the ‘Save/Schedule Report’ link towards the top of your data.
Create a name for the report (that’s meaningful). For example ‘PPC bounces’. This is the name of the report that will appear in the email inbox of the recipient each time it runs.
Type in the email address of the recipient. If wanting more than one recipient, use a comma between each email address. Recipients won’t have to log into the system to see the report data – they will just click on a link.
Select the email frequency (daily is recommended).
Then click on ‘Save’ and you will see your report appear within the ‘Advanced Reports’ column towards the left of the page.
The report will run each day if the parameters that you created are matched. It will then email the report to the recipient(s). If the parameters aren’t matched (e.g. no-one lands on your website from PPC and goes no further than the landing page) then the report doesn’t run.
If you want to edit the report at any time, click on the pencil icon.
This only lets you edit the name, recipients, and frequency. If you want to edit parameters you will need to create a new report.
If you want to stop the report emailing (but still retain it to run manually at any time you want to) then just remove the email addresses via the pencil icon.
If you no longer need a report then just click the X button.
You can use the Advanced Reports function to filter PPC data (via the ‘Visit Source’ pulldown in the General Filtering Selection part of the page), adding on parameters that interest you.
A typical use of analysing in this way is to identify PPC clicks that landed on certain pages, but for which your enquiry levels have been weak when compared to those clicks that you’ve paid for.
By extracting data related to those PPC visitors/pages they visited, you can absorb how those visitors interacted with your website and so make changes to the website or PPC campaigns as becomes clearly beneficial as you study the data.