Linking your accounts
Linking your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts gives you more information about your advertising because you can see how visitors from different campaigns and keywords interact with your website. If you've already linked your accounts, skip to the next section to see how you can view AdWords reports in Analytics.
You can link your Analytics and AdWords accounts by clicking the "Analytics" tab in AdWords. If you don't have a Analytics account already, you'll be asked to create one. Once you link your accounts the data from your AdWords campaigns will automatically appear inside Google Analytics (assuming that you've already installed the tracking code). You can check out this video to learn more about linking your accounts.
You'll also need to install the tracking code on every page on your website if you haven't already. Here are some resources to help you get the code installed correctly:
Once installed, your profile overview page will show that everything is good to go by displaying a status icon that looks like a green check mark. If you have a Google Analytics account, but don't know where to find your tracking code, check out this article for instructions.
Finding your ROI
The Google Analytics AdWords Campaigns report (in the Traffic Sources section) let's you drill down and find out where visitors from each of your campaigns are going and what actions they are taking on your site. After going to the Traffic Sources section, click one of the campaigns listed in this report to view the ad groups within the campaign. Within the AdWords Ad Groups report, click one of the ad groups to see the AdWords Keywords report, where you can find lists of your keywords that brought traffic to your site.
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Finally, click the Clicks tab to see ROI metrics for the keywords. With the ROI information for each of your keywords you can then make more informed decisions about where to target your advertising dollars or how to change your website to better capture these visitors. We'll talk about how to find low and high performers in the next couple weeks.
Tracking your revenue
Don't skip this part just because you don't sell online. If your goals don't have values, you won't be able to measure the return on your investment, so let's explore how you can set up your goals and track your return.
If you have an e-commerce site, your return comes from your e-commerce revenue. But, even if you don't have an e-commerce site, you can probably come up with intelligent values for your goals. For example, if you know that 1 out of every 100 PDF downloads results in a $500 sale, you can assign a value of $5 to that PDF download ($500/100 downloads).
If you have an ecommerce site, you can check out this help center article to learn more about tracking your return, and if you don't sell online, read this one.
That's it for this post. Next time we'll start diving into using Analytics to analyze and improve your AdWords campaign performance.
