Leveraging Google Analytics to Optimize Your PPC Campaign

Gerard Tollefsen - October 3, 2008

When managing a Pay-per-Click campaign it is important to remember that continual optimization of the campaign is critical to success.  Keywords you thought would be perfect to drive qualified traffic to your site when you first launched a campaign may turn out to be poor performers.  Certain geographic locations that logically would make sense to target your ads may be out performed by locations you didn’t think there would be a big demand for your product or service.  An excellent way to discover what is working with your campaign and learn about new opportunities is by analyzing the data from an analytics program.

Here at MoreVisibility, we leverage the data from Google Analytics to help optimize PPC campaigns and expand our knowledge of how customers interact with our client’s websites.  With this knowledge you can optimize campaigns for greater success.  Here are a few examples of how you can leverage the data from Google Analytics to optimize your PPC campaign:

1. First thing is to set up goals in Google Analytics so you can track specific metrics and compare the data from your paid campaign in relation to the traffic coming to the site organically.
2. Conversions are very important, whether for e-commerce sites or lead generation sites.  Review the keywords that result in conversions both from the organic traffic and from your paid ads.  Remove keywords from your campaigns that are not producing, so you can allocate more of your budget to keywords that have a track record of success.  Create a test campaign where you can experiment with new keywords.  Over time, keep the keywords you see generating conversions and remove the poor performers.
3. Analyze where the traffic is coming from.  Is there a specific geographical location that drives more conversions than other locations you are targeting?  For example, you may have a national campaign, but Google Analytics shows that traffic from Florida converts at a higher rate than the campaign as a whole.  If so, think about creating a separate Geo-Targeted Florida campaign and allocating a specific budget to target the customers in that area.  This can give you additional flexibility when determining the most efficient way to spend your advertising dollars.
4. Lastly, look at the relationship between the keywords you are running in the PPC campaign versus the keywords that drive organic traffic to your site.  You may find there are keywords people search on to find your site that you are not running in your paid campaign.  This is an excellent way to expand your PPC keyword list and discover new keywords you originally didn’t think to include in your campaign.  In this way, you are constantly optimizing the campaign and growing the keyword list based on successful keyword research.

Remember, managing a PPC campaign is an every day task.  Optimizing the campaign is critical to your success and using an analytics tool, like Google Analytics, can bring new insight through real world (real time) data, and help you develop a high performing search engine marketing campaign.