How To Save Money On AdWords Placements With Google Analytics

Google’s display network can bring you tremendous amounts of clicks and conversions if used correctly. If it is not used correctly, you can quickly spend mass amounts of money and have nothing to show for it. A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on how to manage the display network so you can […]

Chat with SearchBot

Google’s display network can bring you tremendous amounts of clicks and conversions if used correctly. If it is not used correctly, you can quickly spend mass amounts of money and have nothing to show for it.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on how to manage the display network so you can spend most of your money on sites that are bringing in quality traffic. This is a quick graphic of the workflow that I still use today.

  • The Discovery Campaign is one of your lower daily budgets, and its goal is to find good placements where you want to spend more money.
  • The Placements Campaign is one of your higher budgets as it only contains sites that are helping you reach your overall goals.

SEL1

 

While I find this workflow very useful, the overall problem is when do you decide to block placements?

In your AdWords account, the only data you can see for any placement is conversions and conversion rates. The problem with so little data is that if you wait until you have enough statistically significant data to make a decision, you will never find all of the good placements, and you will have spent too much money on bad ones.

There is another way to gain insight into placements with Google Analytics that can help determine whether a site is sending you quality traffic.

Evaluating Placements With Google Analytics

SEL2

To have access to this data, you need to link your Google Analytics account to your AdWords account.

Next, navigate to the placements information under the AdWords reports (found under traffic sources).

If you have goals set up, then you can sort by the goal completions, conversion rates and other data points to find the sites that are doing well for you.

SEL3

While this data is useful for adding placements, it can also be useful for finding placements that you want to block even if you don’t have statistical data.

Sort Placements By Bounce Rates

Instead of trying to find sites that you want to add as placements, examine bounce rates to find sites where the traffic is so poor, you don’t want to wait for statistical data.

SEL4

 

In this case, we have a handful of sites that have sent more than 18 visitors and have a 100% bounce rate. No one from any of those sites has even gone to a second page, therefore, we will often block these even though we don’t have statistically significant data.

Please note, you don’t want to just block sites if their bounce rates are 100%. You should also double-check the ad copy and landing pages to make sure the offers are relevant for that site. If you consistently see high bounce rates for your display campaigns, then you might need to change the offer and landing page before deciding to block placements.

Just remember, a bounce in Google Analytics is a visitor who only went to a single page and then left your site. If someone gets to your landing page, picks up the phone and calls you, finishes an order over the phone and then leaves your site, they will be counted as a bounce even if they spent 20 minutes on the phone with you.

Create Interaction Goals

A quick way of seeing what sites are bringing in good versus poor traffic is to create interaction goals within Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you can create goals based upon time on site or page views per visit.

SEL5

If you create goals with these types of metrics, then you can easily examine what sites are not meeting your basic minimum interaction and then block those sites that are underperforming.

Conversely, if you find that sites are bringing in visitors that are spending several minutes on your site, you shouldn’t block those sites until you have enough clicks to determine whether those visitors will eventually convert.

By using interaction goals, you can gain another level of insight into the placements where you are spending money, so you can make better decisions about blocking the sites or spending more money on the sites to gather more data.

SEL6

 

If you have various types of goals on your site, I would recommend splitting out these types of goals by goal set. You might have one goal set that is all revenue events, and another one that is site interaction. By splitting these different types of goals out by goal set, you can see one tab of just interaction goals, and another tab of just revenue goals. That way your revenue goal events will not be polluted by site interaction events and vice versa.

Conclusion

Overall, I like Google’s display network. There is a lot of traffic and conversions to be had from managing it correctly. However, if managed incorrectly, the display network can be a money pit. Therefore, you do need a system for managing the display network so it will perform for you.

However, the patience and money required to always have statistically relevant data is beyond what most AdWords advertisers have. Therefore, when you see sites that have several visits and 100% bounce rates, feel free to block them quickly. When you see sites that have some visitors, and those visitors are spending time on your site, you should be more patient in determining whether the site will eventually be a converting one for you.

By using Google Analytics to examine your AdWords data, you can go beyond just examining conversion rates to also determining interaction rates and gaining another viewpoint into the placement sites where you are spending your money, so you can spend your budget as wisely as possible.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Brad Geddes
Contributor
Brad Geddes has been involved in PPC since 1998. He is a co-founder of AdAlysis, an ad testing & recommendation platform, and a member of the programming team for SMX events. Brad is the author of Advanced Google AdWords, the most advanced book ever written about Google's advertising program. Brad has worked with companies who manage tens of thousands of small PPC accounts and other companies who spend millions on marketing each month. His experience ranges from owning his own agency, to managing a boutique agency, to overseeing programs that were official resellers of Google and Microsoft. Some brands he has worked with include: Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Thomson Reuters, YP.com, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Salesforce. One of his trademarks has been demystifying the complicated aspects of SEM. Not one to hold secrets, Brad prefers to educate his readers on the various aspects of crafting successful marketing campaigns to ensure the success for all parties involved.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.