Your online marketing campaigns are live and now it is time to determine exactly what users are doing on your site. Search engines like Google have robust reporting capabilities. Other search engine interfaces have limited amounts of reporting and analytic capabilities. These limited reporting interfaces will not efficiently report data in the same way that an analytics platform like Google Analytics will.

Some of the many features Google Analytics has to offer for a first time advertiser user are simple but sufficient data. These includes a visitor’s time your site, how many pages they viewed, and most importantly, how many visitors you are receiving overall especially from online paid marketing efforts.

The amount of time a visitor spends on your site can tell you a lot about the content on your website. Most likely there is something eye-popping that they are viewing. It could be a video or an application on your homepage. This can tell you how long it takes your visitors to view or complete a call to action on the landing page.

Average time on site is important and can tell a marketer if visitors are clicking on their ad listing and then if they are instantly leaving or browsing. Furthermore, if you see that your visitors are viewing multiple pages, they are likely researching and getting for information about your product or service.

Overall site traffic is very important. Regardless, if it is organic, referred, or paid efforts; you want to separate these to see which is performing best for your website. Using Google Analytics to compare your paid traffic to your organic traffic can help you make better budget allocation decisions.

Have you ever done a very specific search, for example “iPhone 3g” and gotten taken somewhere that doesn’t even mention the iPhone? Many advertisers using paid search don’t realize they are not only missing a great opportunity, they could also be losing business to frustrated or impatient visitors.

Picking the right landing page is highly important in paid search advertising. If an advertiser is bidding on product specific keywords and directing traffic to those product pages, they have an opportunity to capture the buyer toward the end of the buying cycle. The visitor knows what they want, has already done the research and should be close to buying. In addition, bidding on more specific keywords will usually be cheaper than general keywords because there is less competition. Eliminate the need for your visitors to do an internal search. Pick a destination page that is relevant to what visitors are searching for and prevent visitors from leaving the site because they do not see what they are looking for.

Using Google Analytics is a great way to get insight into landing pages performance. Businesses can view top landing pages and exit pages. This is valuable because it can show where the best or worst places are to drive traffic on your site.

AdWords users know that Google offers conversion tracking; however one limitation has been that this conversion tracking did not distinguish between certain types of conversions. For example, if you had 2 offers, newsletter sign up and contact us form, AdWords conversion tracking could not determine which action was taken. In order to see this, you would need to then look into your Google Analytics and cross reference to see which goal was completed. It would even take a few more steps to determine which keyword got the conversion.

With the ability to import Google Analytics goals into your AdWords reporting, there is no need to continue to bounce back and forth between the two platforms to determine where the conversion came from. If your AdWords and analytics accounts are linked, it only takes a few simple steps to import your goals. Then you will easily be able to determine which keywords, ads and campaigns are generating specific conversions. This will help to tailor each campaign to reach your desired goal completion target.

There is no need to install AdWords conversion coding any longer. In fact, conversions could be counted twice if both the engine conversion coding and the analytics goal are recording the same event.

You can also integrate analytics goals with Conversion Optimizer, which is a tool that helps AdWords users get more conversions based on desired cost per acquisition(CPA). Leveraging all of the tools that are available, using them to interpret data and making informed decisions will help any online advertising reach its maximum potential.