Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. Advanced Performance Monitoring

If you have only a handful of campaigns and ad groups to keep track of, the Campaign Summary window (shown in Chapter 10) should work fine. But once you are tracking a dozen or more campaigns, each containing multiple ads and many keywords, in order to retain your sanity—and do a good job of tracking your spending and performance with the multiple campaigns and ads—you’ll need to take advantage of the excellent AdWords reporting facility.

Conversion tracking means implementing a mechanism that tells you when visitors to your site perform a specified action. More specifically, if you are paying for advertising on a CPC basis, unless you are just interested in drawing eyeballs to your site, you’d probably like to know whether this traffic brings you revenue.

Using AdWords conversion tracking, you can add code to your web pages that lets you determine whether traffic generated by AdWords converts, that is, performs an action you want to have happen, such as making a purchase, leaving contact information, signing up for a subscription, or visiting a particular page.

This chapter explains how to use AdWords reports, and how to work with AdWords conversion tracking. I’ll also introduce Google Analytics and explain some of the sophisticated monitoring options available.

Using AdWords Reports

To create a report, click the Reports tab of the AdWords application. Click the Create Report link just under the tab to open the Create Report window, shown ...