Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Website Optimizer: Secrets Revealed!

The Latest and Greatest with Google’s New Adwords Interface

By now most Adwords users are somewhat used to (or at least aware) of the new and improved interface. Google launched these changes to better meet the needs and demands of their online advertisers. Here are a few of the newest updates within the interface that are proving to not only save user’s time, but also assist them in better optimizing their campaigns.

Speakers:
Nick Mihailovski, Google
Eva Woo, Google
Sandra Cheng, Product Manager, Google
Ariel Bardin, AdWords Product Lead, Google

1. Filtering:This feature allows you to better analyze data within your account by the ability to select the information you want for certain attributes like Keyword Status, Avg Position, or Clicks. It’s a good way of filtering out irrelevant statistics from your reports. For example, if you wanted to see your top performing keywords within your account, you could set a filter to find keywords with a CTR greater than 1.5% and conversion rate of at least 4%. The result would be a list of your highest performing keywords across your entire account.
2. Bid Simulator:
   The bid simulator estimates click, cost, impression, and average position data that your ads would have received if you were to increase or decrease your bid. The amount of simulation data you get is based on your keywords traffic (little or no traffic results in no simulation data).
3. Location Extensions for Local Ads:
   This new feature allows you to ‘extend’ your Adwords campaigns by dynamically adding your business address to your ads. You can link your Adwords and Local Business Center accounts to set up the dynamic address attachment, or manually enter in an address directly to Adwords. The cool thing about this feature is Google will automatically match your business location with a user’s location or search terms and show your address with the ad.

Google Analytics: Easy Ways to Get More Useful Website Data

Google Analytics can provide a tremendous amount of information about your website, and here are a few ways to get even more out of this data.

1. Goals and Funnel Reports
   If you don’t already have goals set up within your Analytics account, you should. Goals allow you to see how well your website is meeting your business objectives. They have to correspond with a measurable action performed by your site’s visitors (example, visits to a ‘thank you’ page). Because most visitor actions require multiple steps, Analytics allows you to also set up a Goal Funnel to track how users are actually completing the goal.
2. Event Tracking
   This feature allows you to track visitor interactions that do not correspond directly with page views. It will allow you to track things like downloads and interaction with videos.

Become a Testing Guru with Website Optimizer

Google’s Website Optimizer allows you to test out different elements of you webpage by changing things like the headline, image, etc. and seeing which variation performs the best. There are a couple of new features to help make testing efforts a little more efficient.

1. Pruning
   This allows you to easily disable certain variations within your test that are not performing.
2. Auto-pruning
   This feature does the work for you-it automatically disables poorly performing variations within your test.
3. Reports
   You can now create PDF downloads within the reporting section-a nice, easy way to present your findings.

This session at SES 2009 in San Jose let many advertisers in on some of the newest happenings within these three Google products. These improvements should help you use Google Adwords, Analytics and Website Optimizer more efficiently, and improve your website performance and ROI.

————————————————————————–
Contributed by: Jenna Mistele, Milestone Internet Marketing