Three major Google products connect to Google Analytics to give you a more holistic view of your online efforts: AdSense, AdWords, and Webmaster Tools.
If you’re an AdSense and/or AdWords user, connecting these accounts will add powerful dimensions, metrics, and reports to determine how AdSense is making you money, and what traffic your PPC spend is bringing you.
Everyone should sign up for and connect Webmaster Tools.
Get Baseline SEO Data Through Webmaster Tools
In the era of Not Provided, pulling Webmaster Tools data in is the best (and basically only) way to see which keywords are bringing visitors to your site, which pages they’re visiting, and how that affects your bottom line.
Click Edit, and you’ll get a new window that will prompt you to sign in again. If you haven’t already added your site to Webmaster Tools, you’ll be prompted to do so, and you’ll need tocomplete the verification process.
You’ll have the ability to choose which Views have access to Webmaster Tools data for the website you’ve associated. Go ahead and associate all current Views with this data to make sure the reports are available regardless of the View you’re working in.
If you create additional Views, you will need to come back to this setting and add them to the list, since GA doesn’t automatically add new profiles to your Webmaster Tools access list; adding new Views won’t require you to verify again, just pull down the menu and check the box next to the View names.
Adding Webmaster Tools unlocks the reporting available underneath the Acquisition section of your reports, giving you data on the keywords that are driving search impressions and clicks that lead to visitors. It will also give you your most popular landing pages, and geographic locations.
The Geographic Locations report can become particularly useful if you’re finding that good portions of your buyers are coming through organic search are from countries that don’t inherently use your primary language.
For example, here we see Brazil is the #2 source for search impressions, yet only received 400 clicks from search, a huge difference from the 18,000 clicks that came from the #1 location. This is likely because Brazil’s primary language is Portuguese.
When looking at popular Brazilian shopping sites, like Walmart, we can also see there is a huge difference in design aesthetic from US based sites.
Brazilian Walmart.com
US Walmart.com
Using a tool like Optimizely, you can easily send visitors from a specific country to a page that’s created for their native language. Telling Google to serve the foreign language page is a little more difficult, but you can find out how to do that here.
Unlike other tools like Demographic data or AdWords linked data, Webmaster Tools data is segregated from your other reports, but it’s the best place to clearly see this valuable keyword information.
Improve Your Site’s Ad Revenue with AdSense Data
If you run AdSense ads on your website, here’s the place to connect your Google Analytics account to AdSense.
You’ll be asked to log into AdSense, and choose a primary Property (i.e. website) and View or Views to use with your AdSense data. Connecting these gives you four additional reports under the Behavior section of GA’s reports, and 8 metrics to use in Segments or Custom Reports.
It’s an opportunity to match your visitor data in a holistic, advanced way with your AdSense data to really fine tune your advertising revenue.
Gain More Power Over Your PPC Spend with AdWords Data
If you are spending money with AdWords, you should absolutely connect Analytics and AdWords. The cross-tool functionality is extremely strong between these two products, and linking them together unlocks major benefits in both tools.
In AdWords, you get:
- Access to your Analytics Goals and eCcommerce Transactions to use as conversion metrics
- Ability to use Analytics data to build laser-focused Remarketing lists
- Additional metrics from Analytics that you can use directly within AdWords reports
In Analytics, you get:
- Enhanced and more accurate Multi-channel Funnel data
- 10 built-in reports powered by your AdWords data that quickly give you actionable information
- 20 additional dimensions and 12 additional metrics to use in your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports
eCommerce sites in particular will benefit from connecting to AdWords. Merging Analytics eCommerce revenue tracking with AdWords spend tracking means you can create reports in both tools that will show you how to spend your advertising dollars to see real revenue gains. People using AdSense and AdWords will see similar revenue and spend benefits.
Every AdWords user can benefit from linking to Analytics even without using any of the AdWords-centric reports within Analytics through the use of one major feature: Google Analytics Remarketing lists.
Choose from one of four pre-determined or basic Remarketing list types, or create a unique list of your own based on Segments.
It’s possible to create Segments from many facets of your visitor data:
- Time on site
- Visitors who completed or didn’t complete a goal
- Visitors to specific pages or groups of pages
- & even combinations or specific orders of these visitor metrics
For example, if you were a retailer specializing in clothing, you could create a segment to remarket to visitors who spent more than 3 minutes on your site, visited the t-shirt section of your site, visited your shopping cart page at least once, but didn’t convert; that series would allow you to use display retargeting through AdWords to encourage engaged visitors to return and complete their purchase.
Making the connection between Analytics and AdWords will require that you have Administrator level access to both your site’s Analytics and AdWords accounts.
It takes about 11 steps to link the two products together, but it’s thoroughly worth it.
Two View Settings That Sanitize Data and Increase Your Reporting Power
Going back to the View level, there are two extremely beneficial options on the View Settings page that can both clean up your page reports and add new ways to report on visitor behavior.
Keep Your Data Sane: Exclude URL Query Parameters
This unassuming box, marked optional, is critical if you have:
- tracking parameters appended to your URLs or
- system-generated navigation/content URLs that include parameters
This field is a lifesaver to anyone who has a shopping cart system that adds query parameters at the end of URLs, or uses unique campaign tracking parameters in their online marketing. It is comma separated, case sensitive list of parameters you want Google Analytics to strip from your URLs.
If you aren’t already familiar with URL parameters, a little background is in order. A URL query parameter is a parameter and value pair (e.g. param=value) that can do a variety of things like track where visitors came from, hold information about a visitor’s shopping cart, or pass messages from one page to another. They are extremely useful and also quite common, but they can muddy up your page statistics if you aren’t using Exclude URL Query Parameters.
Why? Because Google Analytics counts every single unique URL separately by default. Let’s see an example of how leaving query parameters in your GA data can lead to problems, and how Exclude URL Query Parameters solves it.
Clicking on this ad for Moo that appeared on Facebook…
Takes me to this URL…
The query string is bolded above. It starts with a question mark, and each parameter and value pair is separate by an ampersand. The query parameters in this URL are:
- utm_campaign
- utm_source
- utm_medium
- utm_content
- nan_pid
In this example, Moo is wisely using UTM query parameters to track how their Facebook campaign is doing. UTM tags are used by Google Analytics to help create tracking labels, and Analytics will automatically strip them from the URL, so you don’t have to worry about adding them in this Exclude URL Query Parameters tool; we only need to focus on custom, unique parameters like the one highlighted below.
Since the parameter “nan_pid” is unique, and is not automatically stripped from the URL by default like the UTM parameters are, their pages reports will start looking something like this:
So instead of seeing all the traffic for us.moo.com rolled together into one line item, there would be multiple lines, one for each unique URL created by each unique “nan_pid” value.
This makes it much harder to create at-a-glance reports for how the overall traffic of the home page is performing.
So how do we solve this?
By entering the parameter name, “nan_pid” in the Exclude URL Query Parameters field, Google Analytics will automatically strip nan_pid and any values associated with it from the URL. It will stop Analytics from showing a list of pages like the one above, and instead attribute the pageviews, sessions, etc to the home page.
If you already have URLs with parameters in your reports, adding them here won’t alter those. Try to add your parameters from the very beginning, or as soon as you implement any new parameters on your site. Remember, the Raw Data View you set up earlier will still capture the full URL with the parameters in tact if you need to troubleshoot.
Tap Into a Keyword & UX Goldmine by Activating Site Search
If you have a search function on your website and it uses query parameters, you have access to important keyword insights that can improve your SEO efforts, as well asimportant user behavior metrics.
Site search data has the potential to revolutionize your user experience efforts by telling you exactly what your visitors want from your website when they get there. Four main reports in the Behavior section of Analytics, 6 additional dimensions, and 18 metrics provide a rich repository of what Jared Spool refers to as “trigger words”, terms that tell you what people really want to do when they visit your site, but that you may be overlooking in your internal linking structure.
Setting Site search Tracking to On opens up a menu that allows you to list up to 5 parameter names used in searches on your site. So if the search box in the header of your site used “q=search+term” and an advanced search page used “advq=search+term”, you would add both q and advq to the box labeled Query Parameter.
There is a checkbox option to strip the query parameters associated with search here also, which means you won’t have to include your search query parameters in your Exclude URL Query Parameters list.
If your site uses categories within search, you can list those separately in the Category Parameter box after turning that sub-feature on.
A good example of using both the search term and category boxes of the Site Search feature would be if you had a search by department function, similar to Amazon’s search feature:
So if Amazon were to use the query parameter “term” for the search box info, and “cat” for the department, or category, and they wanted to strip the search terms from the URLs, butkeep the department parameters so they could see the categorical totals by URL also, their setup would look like this:
If your site search doesn’t use query parameters, you’ll have to leave this off. If your site search doesn’t use query parameters currently, it will require either a change to your search engine (best option) or your tracking code (can cause issues if not implemented correctly).
Use Goals to Define and Measure Success
What is one of the most vital tools for conversion optimization and overall performance tracking, yet still overlooked by many new to Google Analytics? Goals. There are as many uses for Goals as there are definitions of success for websites, so let’s get into what Goals are and how to set them up.
What Goals Are & Why They Matter
First, a brief definition of Goals:
- A Goal in Google Analytics is a set of criteria defined by you to measure if visitors are performing certain actions on your site.
- A Goal conversion is completed when a visitor performs a Goal-defined action.
- Goal completions count once per session, so if a single visitor fills out the same contact form five times in a single session on your site, they will only be counted as one conversion for the contact form Goal.
- Visitors can complete more than one Goal per session. So if Goal #1 is “visit the contact form thank you page” and Goal #2 is “watch a video”, and the visitor performs both of those actions during their session, they will count as a conversion for both Goal #1 and Goal #2.
- You can have up to 20 Goals in a single View, and they are arranged in four sets of 5 Goals each.
- You cannot delete a Goal once it’s created. You can change the criteria, but any history that Goal collected under the old rules will stay the same.
- You can pause data collection and hide Goals from your reports by switching the Recording setting off.
Why Goals make a big difference on your reporting:
Setting up Goals will add the data showing your conversion rate, number of goal completions, and your set value in the Summary version of many of the standard reports under the Conversions header.
Goals are also a subtab of all the primary Google Analytics reports that will allow you to focus in on your Goal data.
It will also add 4 additional dimensions and a minimum of 14 metrics you can use in custom reports or segments.
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