Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, Powered by Google Analytics

Today we’re excited to announce you can use audiences (previously remarketing lists) created in Google Analytics to reach your customers on Google Search, with no tagging changes required. 

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) allows you to tailor your search ads and based on your visitors' past activity on your website. Now you can leverage more than 200 Google Analytics dimensions and metrics to create and activate your audiences for remarketing, then use those audiences to reach and re-engage your customers with a consistent message across both Google Search and Display.

TransUnion cuts CPA in half with RLSA

In order to find more customers while reducing waste in their search campaigns, TransUnion, a leading financial services provider, used the audience creation capabilities in Google Analytics to spend more efficiently on Google Search.

TransUnion started by creating two audiences. The first was for new customers―those who had visited the site and started, but not completed a credit application. The other included customers who had already converted. Splitting the audience between new and existing customers allowed TransUnion to bid higher on Google search ads for new customers and spend less on converted customers.

The new RLSA capabilities in Google Analytics yielded impressive conversion rates and cost efficiencies for TransUnion's search campaigns. RLSA visitors had a lower bounce rate and viewed twice as many pages per session compared with regular visitors. 

By using more tailored text with their remarketing lists, TransUnion increased their conversion rate by 65% and average transaction value by 58%. Meanwhile, CPCs for existing customers dropped 50%, resulting in a roughly 50% drop in their cost per transaction. Read the full case study here. 

How to get started

Getting started with RLSA is easier than ever before thanks to Instant Activation. Within the Admin tab, simply click Property, then Tracking Info, and finally Data Collection. Ensure that Remarketing is set to ‘ON.’

Once you’ve enabled this setting, all your eligible audiences will begin to populate for RLSA.

Building Audiences

If you’d like to create new audiences, there are three ways to get started. 

First, you can create a new audience using the Audience builder in the remarketing section of the Admin tab. Make sure you select the relevant AdWords account to share your audience with for remarketing.

If you have an existing segment you’d like to turn into an audience, simply click on the segment options and select “Build Audience” right from within reporting. This option will take you directly to the audience builder as above.  

Finally, you can get started quickly and easily by importing audiences from the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery.

Activating audiences in AdWords

Once you have shared an audience with AdWords, it will appear instantly in your AdWords Shared Library and will show eligible users in the column List size (Google search).  Keep in mind that an audience must accumulate a minimum of 1,000 users before you can use it for remarketing on Google Search. To get started, follow the instructions in the AdWords Help Center. 

Support for RLSA with Google Analytics is part of an ongoing investment to provide powerful ways to activate your customer insights in Google Analytics, along with recent features like Cohort Analysis, Lifetime Value Analysis, and Active User Reporting. Stay tuned for more announcements!

Happy Analyzing,
Lan Huang, Technical Lead, Google Analytics,
Xiaorui Gan, Technical Lead, Google Search Ads

Best Practices: Combine AdWords with Google Analytics for Better Insights, Bidding and Results

Like sunshine and the beach, or dogs and tennis balls, Google AdWords and Google Analytics are great by themselves but even better together. You'll get high-performance insights into your ads and your website when you link your AdWords and Analytics accounts. Google Analytics does a vital job in this pairing: it shows you what happened after users clicked on your AdWords ads.

We’ve put together a new Best Practices guide, Better Together: AdWords and Google Analytics, to help you get deep insight into your performance. When you analyze performance with the combination of GA and AdWords you can find all sorts of actionable info:

• Which parts of your account drive actual on-site engagement
• Which keywords attract new users to your site
• What messaging and landing pages connect with the different users on your site
• How your business compares across your entire industry

To whet your appetite, here’s a rundown of ten useful GA reports included in the guide (with links that lead you directly to these reports in your own GA account).  Like what you see here?  Download the full version and the condensed one-page checklist to view our complete coverage of GA + AW goodness.

Love Analytics and AdWords being paired together?  Please take our survey about your past success and what else we can do to improve the experience.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

Start Remarketing with Google Analytics Instant Activation

For many advertisers, remarketing is an essential tactic. But remarketing can be a difficult journey, even for the savviest digital marketer. We repeatedly see marketers struggle with tagging hurdles and complex implementation challenges, with the result that only 1 in 5 remarketers successfully completes their setup.

To help make it easier for advertisers to reach their most qualified customers, we’ve enabled remarketing with a single toggle. Instead of manually updating all of your site tags, simply use Instant Activation and get started with remarketing in four easy steps.

Identifying quality visitors and maximizing conversions

GlobalTechLED.com is a producer of LED lighting. Thanks to Instant Activation, John Burns, Director of Marketing, was able to start remarketing quickly. Without waiting for IT to re-tag his site, John successfully launched Global Tech LED’s first remarketing campaign and saw fast results by reaching their highest potential customers.

After enabling remarketing, Global Tech LED leveraged Google’s powerful machine-learning technology in two ways for their online campaigns: Smart Lists for remarketing automatically created lists of visitors who were most likely to engage in a subsequent session on GlobalTechLED.com. Then, Conversion Optimizer instantly adjusted the campaigns’ bids get more conversions at a lower cost, eventually freeing up more time and resources for the company.

As a result, GlobalTechLED.com is currently reaching their performance and outreach goals. To date they’ve doubled their display campaigns’ CTRs and have almost five times more clicks on their remarketing campaign compared to their other campaigns. Website traffic increased by over 100% in the first 30 days of the campaign, and international traffic skyrocketed. They’ve also seen a 75% decrease in CPA for their campaigns.

These kind of results were exactly what the company was looking for. According to John, "We’ve been trying to hit these specific numbers in the account for a couple of months, and Google Analytics Remarketing helped us achieve these in only a couple of days." Read the full case study here.

Four easy steps to get started

Ready to get started with remarketing? You can, with just four steps.

1. In your Google Analytics Property’s settings, choose ‘Audiences’ under the ‘Remarketing’ section.


2. Choose the AdWords account where you’d like to share your Audience and click ‘Next Step’.


3. Click “Enable” to create your first audience of All Users.  You can also come back later and create more complex audiences, like ‘visitors who have spent more than six minutes on site’, ‘visitors who visited more than five pages’, or ‘abandoned cart’.

This step automatically activates Advertiser Features if you haven’t done so already, which also enables Audience Demographics and Interests Reporting. You can manage this setting at any time in the Admin tab, under the ‘Advertiser Features’ section in your Property Settings.


4. Click ‘Create Campaign’ and complete the remarketing campaign creation process in AdWords. Congratulations, you are now a Remarketer!


We’re really excited to make Advertiser Features in Google Analytics simpler and enable all Google Analytics users to be more successful across all their marketing channels. Stay tuned for future improvements!

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Avi Mehta and Rosanne Borja, Google Analytics Team

Segmenting Brand and Generic Paid Search Traffic in Google Analytics

Many advertisers with paid search campaigns advertise on queries mentioning their brand (e.g., “Motorola smartphone” for Motorola) and also on generic searches (e.g., “smartphone reviews”). Because the performance metrics for ads shown against brand and generic queries can be vastly different, many advertisers prefer to analyze these two groups separately.  For example, all else being equal, searches containing the advertiser’s brand name often have higher clickthrough-rates than those that don’t.

Automatic classification

To make analysis of brand and generic performance as easy as possible, we’re introducing a new feature which automatically identifies brand-aware paid search clicks tracked in Google Analytics. We use a combination of signals (including the clickthrough-rate, text string, domain name and others) to identify query terms which show awareness of your brand.  You can review our suggested brand terms and then accept or decline each of them. It’s also easy to add additional brand terms that we’ve missed. 

With the resulting list of brand terms, we classify your paid search traffic in GA so that you can split your “paid search” channel into two separate channels: “brand paid search” and “generic paid search”. This can be done both for Multi-Channel Funnels (for attribution purposes) and for the main Google Analytics channel grouping. See this straightforward step-by-step guide to get started.

Industry feedback

Back in 2012, George Michie from the Rimm-Kaufmann Group, a leading online marketing agency, called analyzing brand and generic paid search together “the cardinal sin of paid search”. We showed him a preview of our new solution and here’s his reaction:

"I've been arguing for many years that advertisers should look at their brand and generic paid search separately. There are massive differences in overall performance - but also in more specific areas, like attribution and new customer acquisition. 

Google Analytics now makes it a lot easier for advertisers to segment brand and generic paid search into separate channels. I'm sure this feature will help many more advertisers measure these important differences - and more importantly, take action on these new insights."

Getting started

Finally: note that this feature works for all paid search advertising, not just Google AdWords. It will roll out to all users in the coming weeks.

To get started, use the step-by-step guide to set up separate brand paid search and generic paid search channels. We’ve already suggested brand terms for every GA view with sufficient paid search traffic.

Posted by: Frank Uyeda, Software Engineer, Google Analytics

Analytics & AdWords Bulk Account Linking

To maximize marketing investment and return, advertisers need insights into the effectiveness of their ads. However, gaining such insights is often overly cumbersome. This is why we’re pleased to announce that in the coming weeks, the Google Analytics and AdWords account linking process is becoming even more streamlined, making it easier for advertisers to quickly gain rich insights. The new linking process allows you to link multiple AdWords accounts all at once. This enables more tightly controlled linking access for each Google Analytics property. 

Enable Bulk AdWords Account Linking

Many Google Analytics users have multiple AdWords accounts. Until now, each AdWords account had to be individually linked. The new account linking wizard allows you to select any of the AdWords accounts in which you have Administrative access. The following screenshot shows what the wizard looks like for a user who has access to an AdWords MCC containing many AdWords accounts. Note that you can select multiple accounts:

Discover Unlinked Accounts

Many users want to quickly find unlinked AdWords accounts and link to them, and the new wizard makes this easy. A quick glance at the AdWords account list in the screenshot above shows which accounts are and aren’t linked. To link additional accounts, just mark the “X” in front of each account, and then continue.

Gain More Granular Control

With this launch, linking to AdWords now takes place at the Analytics property level instead of the account level. This is a benefit for those with many properties in a single Analytics account; if you have different teams of people managing each property, you no longer need to give them access to the full Analytics account in order to link to AdWords. Now, you can simply give that team access to only the appropriate property, and they can manage AdWords links. All it takes is property-level Edit permission to create and update AdWords links. This is another Analytics feature enabling large-scale Analytics customers to better control access to their Analytics accounts.

Visit The New AdWords Linking Section

Once the new linking process has launched to your account, you’ll be able to see all these features. Log in to your Analytics account, click the Admin button in the header, and you’ll see a new AdWords Linking section in the Property column:

These great new features are rolling out now and should fully launch to everyone in the coming weeks. Here’s what one of our users had to say:

"The linking process is now a lot more straightforward as I do not need to toggle between 2 different interfaces. Everything can be done in GA. In addition, all of the accounts that I manage are automatically listed in the interface so I do not need to look for them. This is a vast improvement from the previous experience." Sam Chew, Digital Manager, Air Asia

Log into your Analytics account soon to update your AdWords account links and gain rich marketing insights.

Posted by Dan Fielder and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

On your phone, tablet or laptop: Your results front and center with AdWords Express

The following was originally posted on the Inside AdWords blog.

When you log in to AdWords Express today, you’ll notice that it’s now easier to find the information that’s important to you, whether you’re on your phone, tablet or laptop. After gathering feedback from AdWords Express users, we’ve redesigned the dashboard with ad performance stats front and center.

See how many views, clicks and calls your ad has received from customers on different devices 

Check your ad’s performance on the go

It’s easy to manage your advertising, even when you’re away from the office. For example, to check how many customers have seen your ad from their tablet (while using your own phone) just look under the “Views” graph.

Check your ad’s performance on the go

Go beyond the click with Google Analytics

Now you can see more details about how users interact with your website after clicking your ad by linking your Google Analytics and AdWords Express accounts. Once you connect your accounts, you’ll see a new card on the AdWords Express dashboard (as well as in your Analytics account). 

Google Analytics information in AdWords Express

To learn how to link Analytics and AdWords Express, visit the help center.

If you have additional feedback on this new design, please let us know. And if you haven’t yet started using AdWords Express, you can sign up today. 

Posted by Francisco Uribe, Product Manager

New: AdWords Reports for App download campaigns

Today we’re happy to announce a deeper integration between AdWords and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps that will help advertisers make faster and better decisions about marketing their apps.

To put it simply: link your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts and enable auto-tagging, and you’ll start receiving a new set of detailed reports on things like day parts, destination URLs and keyword positions. These automatic reports show exactly how your search and display campaigns are performing and offer rich insights into the kind of users they’re driving to Google Play. 

Any user of both AdWords and Google Analytics can have this set of reports by just enabling auto-tagging. We handle the rest, so you can focus on optimizing rather than manually tagging AdWords campaigns.

These new reports can be found under the Acquisition menu for Google Analytics App Views. They’ll become visible to everyone over the next few days.

Insights for display & search campaigns

These new reports cover both display and search campaigns. You can: 

• Check the Campaigns report to better understand users being driven into your app, and see how they use your app. 
• Find out from the Day Parts report when users are interacting with your campaigns.
• Use Search reports to find out which keywords and search queries are acquiring the most new users.

Click image for full-sized version

A step towards measuring lifetime value of your customers

Ad campaigns should help you find the best customers. These new reports go a long way towards identifying them. Whether you track in-app revenue or specific goal conversions, you’ll be able to tie user quality to the campaign that brought them to your app.

One of our early Beta testers was Nubee, a Singapore-based game development studio. They shared their experience with us:

"We were satisfied that we could track which keywords attributed to sales. Using this data, we were also able to modify the download page." - Shizuka Watanbe, Head of PR, Nubee

We hope you’ll find these new reports useful. You can get them running by linking accounts and enabling auto-tagging today.

Posted by Rahul Oak, Product Manager, Google Analytics for Apps

Bid Adjustment Reporting in Google Analytics

Our constantly connected world presents a great opportunity for marketers to be more effective and relevant to customers by optimizing for context -- device, location and time. Earlier this year, we launched enhanced campaigns to help advertisers take advantage of these new opportunities and manage their ad campaigns more effectively. Bid adjustments make it easy to raise or lower your bids based on user context.

To help you optimize your bid adjustments, we're introducing bid adjustment reporting in Google Analytics, allowing you to analyze performance for each of your bid adjustments across devices, locations, and time of day. You can access the new report by going to Traffic Sources > Advertising >AdWords and clicking the Bid Adjustments link.

With the new Bid Adjustments report, you can take advantage of the full range of visitor metrics available in Google Analytics to optimize your bid adjustments. This provides a window into your users’ behavior, allowing you to optimize bid adjustments based on behavior & goal conversion data like bounce rate and time-on-site.

In addition, with Ecommerce tracking enabled in GA, you can now use this data to fine-tune your bid adjustments in AdWords based on the actual revenue generated, instead of conversions. This means you can optimize for ROI instead of CPA goals.

A quick example illustrates this (illustrated in the above screenshot). Imagine a hotel chain has set Time bid adjustments of +20% on Saturday and Sunday after observing a better ROI on those days. Using this new report in GA, the hotel chain now observes that their ROI on Sundays is actually higher than on other days of the week. The hotel chain's analyst finds that customers book more expensive rooms and longer stays on Sundays. Using this information, the hotel chain increases its existing Time bid adjustment for Sundays.

This new bid adjustment report is available in all Analytics accounts that are linked to AdWords. We recently made it much easier to link your accounts, so now is a great time to do so if you haven’t already. 

Posted by Nikhil Roy, Product Manager, Google Analytics Team

New AdWords Integration Platform

Advertisers like to see reports in Analytics which are fresh - reflecting their up-to-the-minute AdWords settings - and consistent with the AdWords reporting. Today, Google Analytics is excited to announce that it is rolling out a new AdWords integration infrastructure for our advertisers to realize these benefits. More importantly, the new integration is laying a foundation for adding new AdWords dimensions quickly -  such as Ads - and paving the path for a rich set of reports such as enhanced campaign bid adjustments and Google Display Network targeting settings. Highlighted below are a few ways in which the new platform will start impacting AdWords reports in Google Analytics.

Improved data freshness and consistency

With the new infrastructure, reports will reflect the most recent AdWords settings such as campaign or ad_group names keeping them fresh and consistent with AdWords. In the example below, a user has renamed their campaign thrice from “Big Deal”   “Big Deals”   “Big Deal - Car Accessories”. In the current reports, visits are attributed to the three different campaign names while clicks are attributed to the newest campaign name. After this change,  both visits and clicks metrics would be associated with the most recent campaign name: “Big Deal - Car Accessories”, thus collapsing multiple rows into a single row.

Current Behavior

Campaign	Visits	Impressions	Clicks
Big Deal	542	0	0
Big Deals	381	0	0
Big Deal - Car Accessories	72	68724	1023

New Behavior

Campaign	Visits	Impressions	Clicks
Big Deal - Car Accessories	995	68724	1023

Laying the foundation for richer reporting

The new integration is laying the foundation for adding new AdWords dimensions quickly and for creating new reports with speed. Very soon, advertisers would be able to access reports based on their Enhanced Campaigns’ targeting settings; reports containing rich information to help fine tune ads targeting settings and bid adjustments for improved ROI (Return On Investment).

Show and hide AdWords data via linking

The new integration allows users to show or hide data for auto-tagged AdWords accounts by linking or unlinking the account to a profile. If a user un-links an Adwords account from a profile, all historical data pertaining to the account would be hidden by rolling them up into (not set).

Over the next few weeks, the new AdWords integration platform will be rolled out to GA accounts gradually.

Posted by Narendra Singhal, Google Analytics Team

Webinar Video: Combined Power of AdWords and Analytics

Last Tuesday, Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, shared tips for getting more out of your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts by using them together. During the webinar, they showed why it’s important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts (which is now even easier to do) and how to see Google Analytics data in AdWords as well as AdWords data in Google Analytics. They also presented a live demo of the reports and how to use them.

If you missed the webinar, you can check it out here:



Read on below for answers to some of the top questions we received during the webinar:

Why should I link my AdWords and Google Analytics accounts?
Linking your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts is an important practice to ensure the two measurement tools can work together to help you get the most from your advertising. The bottom line is that linking Analytics and AdWords gives you powerful information that can tell you where you should be spending more or less based on real ROI data. When you link accounts, the data can flow both ways - from Google Analytics to AdWords (for example, engagement metrics or remarketing lists), and from AdWords to Google Analytics (for example your AdWords cost data). In particular, you can take advantage of powerful features such as:

• The ability to dig into campaign/keyword performance by real revenue and cost in Google Analytics
• Importing goals and e-commerce transactions from Google Analytics into AdWords
• Importing Google Analytics metrics like bounce rate, time-on-site, and % new visits into AdWords
• Using Remarketing with Google Analytics to more effectively reach your customers
• Seeing AdWords data in rich reports such as Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels

We covered this topic in detail during the webinar, so watch the video above to learn more.

Could you share the list of resources that were provided during the webinar?
Of course! Here are the links and resources we shared:

• How to Link AdWords & Google Analytics
• How to import Google Analytics data into AdWords
• Optimizing AdWords data in Google Analytics
• Setting up Google Analytics Goals/Ecommerce
• End-to-End Google Analytics Custom Report (requires a Google Analytics account)

What are the best practices around importing Google Analytics Goals? If i’m using AdWords Conversion Tracking should I also import goals?
If you’re currently using AdWords Conversion Tracking, there are still benefits to also importing some of your goals from Google Analytics. In particular, some goals (such as engagement goals) can’t be tracked with AdWords Conversion Tracking, so importing these into AdWords can complement your Conversion Tracking data. However, it’s important not to import any goals that you are already tracking through AdWords Conversion Tracking as this can create double-counting and duplication, which would make your conversion data hard to interpret.

Is it possible to link a My Client Center (MCC) account to Google Analytics?
At this time it’s not possible to link an MCC to Google Analytics. Each individual AdWords account within an MCC needs to be linked to the appropriate Google Analytics property. Learn more here.

How do I import Google Analytics engagement metrics into AdWords?
The process for importing the metrics is straightforward, but it’s important to note that there are a couple of additional steps needed beyond linking the AdWords and Analytics account. The full set of instructions can be found here.

I have noticed discrepancies between the data in my AdWords and Google Analytics accounts, do you know why?
AdWords and Google Analytics differ in some very important ways regarding how they measure and report on data. It’s important to understand these key differences, which are outlined here. Additionally, there are key differences between AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics, which are covered in detail here.

Can someone help me get more support with AdWords and Google Analytics?
Yes, Google partners with a global network of certified partners to help. For AdWords, you can get support directly from Google or you can work with a Google Certified Partner to help with your AdWords management. You can learn more about both of those options here. If you’re looking for help with Google Analytics, you can tap into our global network of Google Analytics Certified Partners, who offer paid services for anything from Google Analytics tag implementation to product training to more strategic support. Learn more here.

What is a tag?
Tags are tiny bits of website code that let you measure traffic and visitor behavior, understand the impact of online advertising and social channels, use remarketing and audience-based marketing, test and improve your site, and more. The tags we mentioned in the webinar are AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics. These both help you understand the performance of your digital campaigns. While AdWords tracks the performance of your Google AdWords campaigns, Google Analytics tracks the performance of any traffic to your website -- such as from email marketing campaigns or social media. You can learn more about how they’re different here and through some of the content in the webinar.

What is a conversion?
A conversion is an action that a customer takes on your website that has value to your business, such as a purchase, a sign-up, or a view of a key page. These actions are called conversions because a customer's click translated -- or converted -- to business. Think of it as the cha-ching! from your cash register. A conversion happens when someone clicks your ad and then does something that’s valuable to your business, such as an online purchase or a call to your business from a mobile phone. Conversions help you understand how much value your ads bring to your business. You can read more here. 

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics

Improving Analytics & AdWords Account Linking

Many businesses advertise to find new customers, and optimizing advertising campaigns to reach the right people will increase marketing effectiveness and ROI. Google Analytics helps marketers achieve this by offering insights into customer behavior on an advertiser’s websites, apps, and other properties. By linking AdWords and Analytics accounts together, these rich insights from Analytics can flow into AdWords.

Today, we’re happy to announce some useful improvements making it easier for Google Analytics and AdWords account owners to link their accounts.

Here are a few specific benefits of combining AdWords and Analytics data:

• Importing Analytics goals and transactions into AdWords allows marketers to define success in powerful ways, often without having to retag your site
• Site engagement stats help marketers better understand marketing performance and how to optimize
• Remarketing with Google Analytics allows marketers to reach new audiences
• Importing AdWords data into Analytics lets marketers see data across many accounts in aggregate and combined with rich site metrics

All of these features depend on linking AdWords and Analytics accounts, and this process is now easier than ever before. Previously, linking accounts involved multiple steps on many pages spread out between two products, and this process has now been consolidated into just a couple steps all in one linking wizard.

Once the new linking process launches to all Analytics accounts in the coming weeks, you’ll be able to create additional links from the Admin section of your Analytics account. (If you’re logged in to your AdWords account, you can also link accounts by going to Tools and Analysis > Google Analytics and following these same instructions.)  Just click AdWords Linking in the Account column, and then click the New link button to start the linking wizard.

To take advantage of simplified account linking, benefit from combining data in both products, and get more out of your marketing campaigns, follow the steps above to link your accounts or learn more in our help center.

Posted by Chris Morgan and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

See the full Impact of Unclicked Display and Video Ad Impressions using Google Analytics

Every customer journey is different — a customer may see your display or video ads, receive an email, and then click through to your site from a search ad or organic search listing. Often, viewing display ads can attract your clients’ interest in your product and brand even if no click occurs. Traditionally, measurement technology separated out impressions or “view throughs” from clicks, but this separation missed out on valuable data on the impact of display advertising.

Thanks to our integration with the Google Display Network (GDN), Google Analytics can now break down the separation between clicks and impressions and give a more complete view of the customer journey. When a user views display ads on the GDN, or video ads on YouTube, and later visits your website and converts, these interactions with your brand can now be captured in Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels reporting.

GDN Impression Reporting is now available through limited whitelist. You can sign-up through this form to participate. Please note that we cannot guarantee access, but we will do our best to provide this feature to as many users as possible. Please also note that this data will only surface in the Multi-channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics. For more information on how to enable the feature in GA please see our help center article.

Read on below for more tips on how to make the most of this new feature.

How does Display fit on the conversion path?
By enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics, you can learn how your display impressions assist your conversions.


In the Multi-Channel Funnels Overview Report you will see two additional conversion metrics. Impression Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversion paths were touched by a display impression. Rich Media Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversions had a rich media interaction on the path to conversion. Rich media interactions are user interaction with YouTube or rich media ad formats, such as ad expansion, video control (such as play, pause, and resume), or switching a video ad to full screen.

With the new Interaction Type selector you can now immediately filter your reports based how your users interacted with your marketing.

• Select Impression to see conversion paths from customers who saw your GDN display ads but did not click on them.
• Add Direct to the mix, to see who saw an ad and then visited your site directly to convert on a relevant transaction or Goal.
• If you want to focus on Rich Media interactions, you can select this interaction type to see how your users convert after interacting with your rich media and YouTube ads.

How do I quantify the impact of display on the conversion path?
In the Multi-Channel Funnels Top Conversion Path report you can see two new path elements, which indicate the presence of a display interaction. The “eye” symbol indicates a pure display impression from a non-interactive display image. This means a user has been exposed to your display ad on the journey to conversion, without clicking on it. The “movie” symbol indicates a user has interacted with one of your Rich Media ads, such as a YouTube video ad.

Now you can see how many conversion paths, and how much associated value, has been driven through paths which benefited from a display impression or rich media interactions. To better quantify your brand targeted display efforts, consider breaking out these campaigns using custom channel grouping.



Assigning partial credit to valuable display interaction touchpoints
You can use the custom model builder from the Attribution Modeling tool to assign partial credit to these display events. Consider giving these events on the user’s conversion path more credit, and compare this against your baseline model.

We also added a new set of dimensions to help you define valuable custom segments for your analysis. Want to see how many users are watching your TrueView video ads fully? Just create a custom segment using one of our new dimensions, TrueView. The full list of new dimensions is:

• Above the Fold: This dimension uses the Google Above the Fold measurement solution. The value is “Yes” if the ad was in the visible area of the screen when the page was loaded.
• Video Played Percent: The value can be “>=25%”, “>=50%”, “>=75%”, and “100%”, allowing you to see how much of a video ad was watched.
• TrueView: If a user has watched more than 30 seconds of an ad, or watched the ad completely, this will have a value of “Yes.” This is a payable event.

Enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics
Once we have whitelisted your account, please ensure you have successfully linked your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account. Linking accounts takes just a few moments. Under ‘Data Sources’ > ‘AdWords’ you can then see an entry for each linked AdWords account. In the row there is a toggle switch named ‘GDN Impression Reports’, which turns the display impression data from the Google Display Network On and Off. Data is recorded from the time the switch is turned On.


We hope these new tools will help you understand the full impact of your display campaigns through Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution. Sign up today for GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics.

Posted by Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Webinar Next Tuesday 6/18: Unleashing the Combined Power of Google Analytics and AdWords

Register for next week’s webinar: Register here

In many ways, Google Analytics and AdWords were made for each other. AdWords helps advertisers reach an audience and reports on advertising performance, and Google Analytics can tell you what actions your users take when they actually get to your site. You may have a high clickthrough rate (CTR) in AdWords, but what if you could see that 70% of those users left immediately after arriving on your landing page? While understanding the conversion rate of AdWords ads is critical, it’s also important to understand what happened to the users that did not convert or complete the action you wanted them to. For example, did users ‘bounce’ after landing on your site or did they view a few other pages and then leave? How much time did they spend on your site? Which keywords drive the majority of your Ecommerce revenue?

Thanks to built-in Google product integrations that provide unique insights into your data, you can view reporting and data in Google Analytics that directly relates back to your advertising in AdWords. Understanding how to use both of them together will help you refine your AdWords campaigns and improve the performance of your business.


Next Tuesday, join Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, for a detailed look at how to use Google Analytics and AdWords together. In this webinar, we'll show you why it's important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, how to see both Google Analytics data in AdWords and AdWords data in Google Analytics, and walk through a live demo of the reports and how to use them. You'll learn how to make your marketing more effective by analyzing Google Analytics data, such as bounce rate, pages per visit, conversion rate, and Ecommerce revenue in conjunction with AdWords factors, such as keyword performance, ad copy, ad groups, and more. The webinar will also include a live Q&A section.

Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT/ 6pm GMT
Duration: 1 hr
Level: 101 / Beginner
Register: Register here

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Google Analytics team

Make better decisions in AdWords with your Google Analytics data

A version of the following post originally appeared on the Inside AdWords Blog.

Google Analytics users already know how useful it is to analyze advertising and web data together. Now we’re making it possible to use your Google Analytics data right in AdWords. After setting up AdWords to import your Google Analytics data, you’ll have access to key metrics like Bounce Rate, Pages Per Visit, and Average Visit Duration directly in the AdWords interface. With more performance data available right where you’re managing your campaigns, you can make better informed decisions and improve your AdWords ROI.

Using your Google Analytics data
With Google Analytics you can find insights that matter, including how visitors arrive at your website, how they use it, and how you can keep them coming back. Here are some ways you can take advantage of the new Google Analytics data available in AdWords to improve your results.

• Attract more engaged users. If highly engaged users are an important goal, sort your ad groups to find the ones that deliver visitors who stay on your site the longest (“Average Visit Duration” or “Pages Per Visit”), and bid more for these.
• Discover opportunities to convert more engaged visitors. You might find certain keywords or ads that have relatively low conversion rates, but great engagement metrics. You could lower your bids by a little and move on. Or you could see this as a great opportunity to convert clearly engaged visitors into buyers. By adjusting your offer, adding an incentive (like a coupon or discount code), or making your call to action more obvious and accessible, you might be able to improve your ROI and your conversion volume. To look for these types of opportunities, create a filter based on conversion rate and sort by Average Visit Duration, Pages per visit, or Bounce Rate.
• Identify ads with badly matched landing pages or inaccurate targeting. Pages with both low conversion rates and low engagement metrics (low Average Visit Duration or High Bounce Rate) could indicate a poor landing page for a particular ad or keyword. It might also suggest inaccurate targeting. To identify and troubleshoot these problems, set up a filter for low conversion rate and low engagement rate and regularly monitor it. Since you’re using Google Analytics, you can easily set up A/B testing on the landing page using a Content Experiment.

Success in action

Casamundo, the biggest vacation rental listing service in Europe, has been an early tester of this new feature. They've used Google Analytics since 2008 and over the past 5 years they've grown and refined their AdWords campaigns to over 50 million active keywords across 10 languages. Their analysis shows that converting visitors research vacation rentals over an average of 7.4 visits, so understanding whether their ads and keywords can create strong engagement is vital to their business and how they optimize their AdWords campaigns. Seeing high bounce rates and low average time on site for a keyword means that the offer or destination page might not be a good match for that keyword.

Having easier access to Google Analytics data right in AdWords has helped Torge Kahl, Online Marketing Manager, at Casamundo make better decisions and make optimizations more quickly. According to Torge: 

“The combination of using both Google AdWords and Google Analytics has proved to be the perfect set of tools for us to achieve our goals, and we're very happy to see this combination get more integrated and powerful. Using Analytics data right within AdWords has let me better optimize our account and significantly improve the return on our AdWords investment."

More details

Please visit the AdWords Help Center for step-by-step directions on how to connect your Google Analytics profile data to your AdWords account and for more details. 

To exchange tips and ask questions of others, please visit the AdWords community. You can always contact AdWords support for help if you need it.

Posted by Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

You can now see mobile ad performance in Google Analytics.

Starting this week, some of you will see enhanced Analytics reports with mobile ad performance metrics. All AdWords reports in the new interface will be gaining a new visual toggle as shown below for “All”, “High-end Mobile” and “Tablet” ads.  All AdWords metrics available in Google Analytics can be segmented by these new mobile and tablet dimensions.

 

As more consumers begin to make use of tablets or high-end mobile devices, businesses need to understand this shift towards mobile and adapt your marketing mix. This mobile ads reporting enhancement in Google Analytics is one of many steps that we are taking towards helping you make more sense of how mobile advertising interacts with your business.

Please let us know what you think, and suggest any other mobile measurement options you’d like to see that help make sense of your mobile advertising effectiveness.

- Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

Linking all of your AdWords accounts to Google Analytics

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, Gavin Doolan, an Analytics specialist shares some of improvements to AdWords linking in Google Analytics v5.

We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to use multiple AdWords accounts with Google Analytics more effectively.

Previously it was only possible to link a single AdWords account to a single Google Analytics account. This made it more challenging to use auto-tagging and the AdWords reports inside of Google Analytics.

Starting today, you can now link multiple AdWords accounts to your Google Analytics account. The new data sources section in the Google Analytics account settings area makes it easy to use auto-tagging with multiple AdWords accounts and import your AdWords data into Google Analytics.

Let’s take a look at how to set this up:

Before you start, make sure that you're using a Google account that has access to both your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, and is an Administrator for the Analytics account.

If you want to link multiple AdWords accounts to a single Analytics account, you need to set the new version of Analytics as your default:

1. Sign into Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics.

2. Click New Version at the top right of the page.

3. Click Make this version default.

If you skip this step, you won’t see the new linking interface when you sign into AdWords.

Linking your accounts

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.

2. Click the Reporting and Tools tab, then click Google Analytics.

3. Click the gear icon at the top right.

4. Click All Accounts at the top left of the page.

5. Click the account to which you want to link the AdWords account.

6. Click the Data Sources tab.

7. Click the AdWords tab.

8. Click Link Accounts button.

If you are linking from a My Client Center child account the process is very similar. You can more in this article: Linking Analytics Accounts to My Client Center (MCC) Accounts.

Improvements to applying AdWords account data to multiple profiles

Now that you can link multiple AdWords accounts to Google Analytics, we’ve also made it easier import your AdWords data into multiple profiles in Google Analytics. We have put together a quick video demonstrating how to do this:

If you’re less of a visual learner, you can always find instructions on how to link accounts in the Google Analytics Help Center.

Happy linking!

Gavin Doolan

Google Analytics Team