Google paid search (Adwords) can be an important source of traffic to your website, but as with any marketing channel, it’s important to track the performance of your Adwords campaigns. This tutorial will explain how to track conversions of your keywords in Google Analytics.
How to Track Adwords Conversions per Keyword in Google Analytics
It’s very straightforward to look at your keyword performance once you have everything set up properly. First, make sure your Adwords account is linked to your Google Analytics account. You can follow these instructions if it isn’t already. You’ll also need to have e-commerce tracking and/or goals set up in your Google Analytics account since these represent your conversions.
In the example video, we are using the Google demo account which is of the Google online property, that sells Google-branded merchandise. It has e-commerce tracking set up already. If you want to follow along and have the data look the same, sign up for the demo account and in the date range in the reports select 1/1/2018 - 2/10/2018.
To track Adwords conversions in Google Analytics, follow these steps:
- Navigate to the Acquisition - Adwords - Keywords report.
- At the top you can select to filter the data to the device you’re interested in and alter the dates.
- Next you see the line chart plotting your Paid Search users visiting your site. You can add in other metrics to plot along with users, like the e-commerce conversion metric (or other goal conversion rate) to see the overall conversion rate of your Adwords traffic over time.
- Last is a table with all the primary metrics you’d expect per keyword. All the way to the right you have e-commerce conversion rate as a default, but you can select other goals you have configured from the dropdown menu. You can also add secondary dimensions to your keyword like the Ad Group the keyword is in.
You can also navigate to the next report, Search Queries (under Acquisition - Adwords). This will give you an equivalent report but by search query. Search queries are the terms that users actually typed into Google, instead of by the keyword you’ve configured to match their search term.
Conclusion
As with any marketing channel, it’s important to monitor the performance of your Adwords campaigns.