Effectively Use Analytics Through Five Easy Steps - September 26th, 2008
There is a lot of information available in Google Analytics to help analyse the success of your PPC campaign. Sometimes it is a bit like information overload and difficult to know where to begin. Here are five tips to help understand the information at hand.
Any effective PPC campaign needs to have set objectives and goals e.g. sales, enquiries or conversions. There are other statistics available however to measure the success of your account. Analytics has a number of reporting facilities to help show how your site is engaging with the traffic you are sending to your site and how that traffic is navigating around your site once they are there.
First of all you can take an overview of the traffic to your site, by segmenting out paid traffic from natural. This feature then gives statistics based on the type of traffic.
It is possible to also segment out new and returning visitors, therefore allowing you to successfully determine the amount of new traffic to your site. If your aim is to direct as much unique traffic to your site, then this is a good statistic to know as the new visitors can be isolated and their movements can be seen. In terms of PPC, new clients are more likely to lead to enquiries, leads and sales. However, return visitors show that people are engaging in your site.
The number of page views is another good figure, if people do not pass your homepage then your website content is not engaging your visitors or perhaps the usability is not functional enough. If your site is working well it maybe that you are not being targeted enough in your PPC campaign. This can also affect your conversion rate as if your site is not appealing to the traffic you are paying to get there then you are burning your budget.
The bounce rate is one of the first figures that I generally look at; The Google definition of this is ‘the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page’.
This measures visitor quality as you will never achieve good return on investment and large numbers of conversions if people are not engaging in your site. Basically a high bounce rate indicates that the quality of traffic to your site is poor. The PPC bounce rate should always be lower than that of natural traffic as the PPC traffic will be targeted. The bounce rate can be improved through making landing pages more relevant, more engaging and more user-friendly. Effectively, the main point here for PPC is to fulfil the search query as effectively as possible. PPC allows specific landing pages for different keywords and ads, so landing pages can be tailored to ensure they are relevant to each campaign, thus showing the information that the ad copy promised.
Average time on site is similar to the above and again measures the quality of traffic. Beware of this figure as it can be misleading, some people leave the browser open when they are not actually operating on your site.
The main point here for PPC is that you can determine what keywords and URLs are generating traffic and how that traffic engages with your site. Analytics gives data on how your site operates and clues on ultimately how you can get the right traffic making the right choices on your site, through measuring these figures you can improve your website and improve your PPC performance.
Tanase Rivers
PPC Account Manager
