Guide to Google Analytics for Adsense and Adwords Campaign

Running online businesses (tangible or intangible) have no difference with traditional businesses; require data to support our decision. Accurate and useful statistical data will drive better decision making process while give some feedback for our previous campaign activities as well.

 Luckily, Google as the leader in search engine market share and online advertisement provide many free tool for us to create, monitor, maintain and evaluate our marketing campaign activities. Previously, I wrote about Google Adwords Keyword Tool, a very useful tool to find high search keywords with low competition, suitable if you plan to run some Google Adwords campaign or plan to earn extra revenue from Google Adsense.

In this article, I focus on Google Analytics a free service that provides comprehensive historical data on users/visitor who visit to our website, blogs, or hubs. Before we go into details on Google Analytics reports, to this services you need to add Google Analytics tracking code to each page of your site, either use of some plugins (available for many CMS including Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc.) or add manually then wait for verification. Once verified Google will gather traffic data and present the results.

To get the most of Google analytics reports you need to know how to interpret these reports as a whole. Here a few guides how to analyze data and how to use the data visualizations in Google Analytics.

Create context for your analysis and avoid focus on one single metric. If you plan to analyze a page, put all metric related to that page in context. Look at the example below: 1,610 pageview has little meaning, but if you put all data relate to this page view together, you’ll know that main page (drive 28.6% traffic) is declining, thus probably will give big impact on your site performance.

Find some trends and investigating change in trends. If you sell seasonal products, your traffics data should reflect this trend otherwise there is something wrong. In many cases trends provide context, add context by adding more period of time or compare one period of time to another period of time will work as well.

To get more idea if some trends have some effect, Google provides ability to overly two graphs in one time period. In this example I want to know if increase in traffic effect on time spent for each unique, as you can see, average time on site quite steady overtime.

Once you login to your Analytics account, you’ll find your dashboard which is basically like a Business Intelligence application/software. By default, there are 6 types of graphs in your dashboard: Site traffic, Site usage, Visitor overview, Map overlay, Traffic source, and Content Overview. You can customize the dashboard: re-arrange the frame position, add additional reports, or remove a report.

There are at least 80 Google Analytics reports that will help you analyze all possible data about your website traffic. Below some most valuable analytics report that might be useful for Adsense or Google Adwords campaign.

Top Traffic Sources – can be accessed from TRAFFIC SOURCES -> ALL TRAFFIC SOURCES. This report shows top referral site where your visitor came from. Very useful to access if you do specific program such as PR article or submitting your article to article directory and want to analyzed effectiveness of your campaign program. Understanding your traffic source will help you to focus on top site that might work for your and maximized your leverage.

Top Content – can be accessed from CONTENT -> TOP CONTENT. This report shows your top visited content on your website. Most likely, it includes your number 1 landing page – homepage – then you can understand your visitor’s behavior, what type of page they looking and things they want to read.

Top Keywords – can be accessed from TRAFFIC SOURCE OVERVIEW -> KEYWORD. This report is very useful if you do online campaign as well. Compare this result with your campaign keyword will help you do decide which keyword is the most effective to drive traffic.

Map Overlay – this report shows map of the world with layer of number of traffic on drive from each region. You can drill down the map to the smallest component which is city, thus will let you know potential market of your product/services.

Dig some more into these three reports, they present most valuable page on your site. Evaluate and analyzed all measurement related to these top page including conversion and goals. One thing you have to keep in mind: always use the Goal Conversion tab when reviewing reports so you can see which keywords, referring sites, top content produce the highest number of conversions.

Identifying and setting up goals is one of the most important steps in analyzing process. Goals can be many things from addition item to cart or buying, click to a link, or form submission. You can track each of these goals; relate these goals to other statistical data. Focus on conversion first worry about bounce rate later.

To set up Goals you can access from ANALYTICS SETTINGS -> PROFILE SETTINGS (or click EDIT) after you login. Last tip: integrate your Google Adsense or Google Adwords account into this Analytics to get more comprehensive report for all your marketing/campaign activities.

The next things you need to do is to install the tracking code and start analyzing. If you don't have any website, then find a good web hosting provider, install Wordpress and start publishing, or better just sign up with Hubpages, write and publish.

This hub is one of the Google tools series for SEO. Read more about tools for market research including Google Trends - Google Insight, and Google Sites.