Looking to get the most out of your Google Ads? Linking Google Ads and Google Analytics is a very important step to creating a successful Google Ads Campaign.
We want you to get the most out of these free tools, so let’s explore how to best use the analytics provided by Google.
How Google Ads uses Google Analytics audiences once the accounts are linked
Google Ads can use many automations, smart bidding, and always has room for optimization. However, to take action and be led in a specific direction requires data to go off of.
Google Analytics fills that gap; it produces lots of data that drives insights for Google Ads.
The biggest advantage of Google Analytics is that it creates a basis for what your targeted audience is based on the analytics. Google Ads can take that information in and dynamically change bids, tailor ad creatives, etc.
Let’s look at the specifics of how Google Ads can best use the data given from Google Analytics…
Ways Google Ads can leverage Analytics audiences to improve targeting and ROI
Google Ads can automate certain aspects of your campaign using Google Analytics, and some of these things you may have to do on your own.
Here’s how audiences get leveraged:
- Remarketing lists: Google Analytics can create an audience profile for those who completed certain behaviors, such as viewing a product, abandoning a cart, viewing the pricing page, etc. These users can then be retargeted with relevant ads.
- Bid adjustments: Bidding higher on different keywords and targeting different audiences can be adjusted based on which audiences have a higher Conversion Rate. Essentially, moving your bids from low-converting audiences to higher-converting audiences.
- Automated bidding optimization: Google Ads can automate bidding strategies based on the Google Analytics data. The better the data, the better the automation.
- Conversion tracking: Goal setting done in Google Analytics can be imported to Google Ads for consolidated tracking of the results your business is seeing.
Essentially, Analytics can give a bigger picture of what’s happening across each part of the funnel for your business.
Implementation Playbook: Putting it Into Practice
Knowing that Google Ads and Analytics work well together is great, but let’s look at how we can put them together for your business.
Let’s look at how to approach this:
Step 1: Build your audience to match your business decision
Before jumping into an audience segment in Google Analytics, you want to evaluate if the audience changes how much you bid, what your ads look like, or where you’re spending your budget. If none of those are changing, it’s probably not worth the time.
It’s important to look at how effective an audience is, if they are consistently converting or getting close to converting, deep in the funnel.
Some of these points to evaluate are:
- People who viewed the product but didn’t take action
- Users who started the purchase process and didn’t finish
- First-time site visitors versus people who come back
- Past purchasers
These different stages of audiences should each be targeted by different types of ads to increase the conversion rate.
Step 2: Give every audience a job
Once you’ve imported your audiences from Google Ads, each one should have a purpose. These can be:
- Bid adjustments: Increasing bids for high conversion audiences.
- Direct targeting: Changing from broad to targeted bidding for specific audiences is important to engage those who have already seen your brand. This includes remarketing and showing more ads to those who have seen your ads already.
- Exclusion: One of the least used groupings, you can prevent certain groups that don’t convert from seeing your ads. This can help to prevent redundant ad usage for those who have already converted as well.
Step 3: Ensure your data pushes in the same direction
This is where a lot of advertisers miss out. If you’re using Google Ad Campaigns with Smart Bidding strategies, the software already learns from conversion data. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of having better output from a better input.
One of the best ways to improve the outputs is after linking Google Analytics to Google Ads is aligning conversion goals on both platforms. Both platforms need to align on what actions count as a conversion. This allows Smart Bidding to have better signals to work with.
Pro Tip: Relying on Analytics conversion alone can make Google Ads reports look different than usual.
These ideas are just guidelines, as always, each business’s needs are individual. Making these changes and figuring out the best way to move forward with your business can be time-consuming and not always guarantee results, especially if you’re new to Google Ads.
If you’re interested in Google Ads help, consider reaching out to MPire Marketing. We can give you back the time it would take for you to learn and do Google Ads, and guarantee a solution.