PPC Analytics in the Dark
Anyone with a PPC campaign should have a Google Analytics account setup and linked as a mandatory requirement, in fact scrap that, anyone with a website should have a Google Analytics account. The combination of these two Google tools provides the user with a wealth of information to hand on almost every aspect of the traffic coming to the site, ranging from how they got there, what they did while they were there to where they left the site. This data is invaluable when optimising all aspects of a pay per click campaign.
Whilst there are many things shown up in Analytics, it has long been known by a few but not known by many that the results it shows up for PPC campaign data only show the keyword the search triggered and not the actual search term used. So for example if someone searched “fast blue car”, Analytics may show up that there was a click for the keyword “fast car” which is in the campaign on broad match. Whilst this information is fine from an ad group performance point of view it doesn’t offer any insight into what additional keyword terms would perform better or if there are additional negative keywords that need to be added.
It seems there are a number of solutions to this and certain people have known about it since 2006! I won’t attempt to take the credit for the solutions, instead I will link the method that I think is the easiest at the bottom of this blog. This method basically uses the filters function within Analytics, to which 2 filters are added. Once setup this provides on the keyword report for Google PPC traffic not just a list of campaign keywords that are triggered but also the search term that was used in brackets afterwards.
Why don’t Google provide this information as standard if it’s this easily available I hear you all ask. Well judging by some of the results I have seen and based on the fact that Google makes the largest proportion of it’s money from PPC campaigns through keywords on broad match, if everyone had this facility on their account they would have a much better view of what people are searching. So there is less guess work involved and more keyword phrases on exact match.
One of the more interesting points this gives visibility to is Google’s most recent policy on broad match which is as follows “With broad match, the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren't in your keyword lists. Keyword variations can include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords.” It is very interesting to see just how liberal Google is with this policy and I get the feeling that there would be plenty of people not too happy with exactly what Google deems as relevant to their campaign.
