Google Adwords provides data surrounding the performance of your ads in terms of how often they show, get clicked on, and result in conversions. Most of the information is used to determine how well the ads are working to obtain traffic and at what cost.
Google Analytics, on the other hand, provides more information surrounding what visitors do once they’re on the site: whether or not they bounced, how many pages they visited, how much their order value was, etc.
By linking your Google Analytics account to your Adwords account, you can combine the data from both of these accounts into one place and gain much more insight into the performance of your paid search efforts. You can analyze not only the click-through rate of an ad group, but also the bounce rate. Combining these metrics can help you understand how users are interacting with your message.
For example, if you have really enticing ad copy about a sale, you may have a really high click-through rate and decide that that version of ad copy does really well. However, if you then notice that the bounce rate is very high, you might conclude that although the ad copy is really enticing, users are not liking what they see on the landing page – and therefore you’re spending your budget on a lot of bounces. This means you should either tweak your ad copy to qualify your traffic or make changes to the landing page to satisfy the user.
Anybody can write an ad that has a high click-through rate and bring visitors to a site, but if site interaction and goal completions are important to you, it’s more effective to spend your budget on qualified traffic – not “all the traffic.”
To link your GA account to your Adwords account, go to the Linked Accounts section of your Adwords settings and specify the GA account you want to link.
Top image credit: Twin Design / Shutterstock.com
Why It’s Important to Link Your Adwords & Analytics Accounts
by Kelsey Cadogan on July 6th, 2015 | ~ minute read
