1 – Clean Out the Brand & Expand
You need to mine your analytics software for keywords that can expand and contract your PPC account. The best source of lateral ideas for keywords to bid on, especially if you have a lot of content on your site, is from the organic traffic you already get from the search engines. In order to see the terms coming from search engines in GA, click Traffic Sources > Keywords. If you select “non-paid” you’ll see data over time for your organic traffic, and a short-list of your top referring keywords. You can choose another metric like source to see where they’re coming from, and look at goal or monetary information for them also. In order to clear this list up you have to apply an “exclude” filter on the list of keywords. This option is available at the bottom of the list of words, just pull down where it says “Filter Keyword” and select Exclude. In the exclude field type your brand words, or parts of words, separated by the pipe symbol, “|”. This symbol just means “or”. Once you apply the filter, the data over time graph at the top will reflect the filtered keywords, which incidentally is a great way to monitor your overall organic SEO efforts, as will the list of keywords presented. Simply set the number of rows in the bottom right to something large like “500”, and explore the list for juicy new keyword ideas.
2 — Exacting Adwords
If you’re running a PPC campaign, you need to understand your match types, and while I believe they should only be used very strategically, chances are you’re bidding on some broad-matched terms. The second technique I want to present for gaining clearer insight into your PPC campaign via Google Analytics is something I actually consider completely mandatory for any advertiser who utilizes “broad match” in their Adwords campaigns. It’s just a set of two filters that you apply in your GA account, which reveal to you the actual phrases that people searched at Google which triggered your ad. If you’re a PC computer shop and bid on broad-match for “laptops”, it might be nice to know if you wasted ten bucks today for people searching “apple laptops”. Revealing the long-tail of the phrases you’re bidding on lets you both expand and contract your account, intelligently. If you see phrases where the searcher-intent doesn’t match your website’s offering, look for patterns, and you might find a new “negative keyword” to prevent your ad from being shown where it’s not relevant. On top of contracting with negative matches, you should constantly mine this set of “long tail” phrases to find more phrases to bid on specifically. If you bid specifically on a phrase instead of on a part of it via broad-match, chances are you’ll be saving money, be up against less competition, and you’ll have a chance to tailor your ad and landing page with more relevance.
3— Compare Data in Context
Google Analytics lets you look at data over time very easily, enabling you to spot trends, but if you don’t put the time-frames you’re looking at or comparing into context, it loses meaning. Sometimes a necessary aspect to consider in order not to lose context is seasonality. I recommend, in most cases, comparing time frames to their equivalent from the previous year — it rarely makes sense to compare Q1 data to Q4 data without taking seasonal trends into account, and if you don’t have a sophistimacated formula for doing so, just compare it to the same time last year. To do this just click the down arrow to the right of the date range box, and select “compare to past”. Then just change the secondary date range to read from a year earlier and click apply:
There you have it folks, three simple but essential ways to gain a clearer view of your traffic and trends, to make more intelligent and informed decisions for your organic and PPC search campaigns.