I speak to a lot of small business owners who use Google Adwords to promote their products and services. A common problem that arises is that people don't really know how well their Adwords campaigns are performing.
The main reason to link the two Google accounts is to see how people are interacting with the pages on your website when they click your paid advert.
Before I carry on, click here to see how to link your Adwords account to Google Analytics.
What should you look out for?
Linking your Adwords and Analytics provides a wealth of useful information, including:
1) What times of day people click on your ads.
2) How long people spend on your site when they come through from your sponsored listing.
3) The percentage of people who only visited one page then left your site (known as bounce rate).
4) The average number of pages per visit.
5) The percentage of new visitors.
Optimise, optimise, optimise!
There's a whole lot more data available than just this. It's easy to see how having access to a mine of information could help you tweak your Adwords campaigns for the better.
For example, if you're paying £5 per click for a specific keyword and people are on average spending 3 seconds on that particular page, you may want to look closely at your images and content. Another option would be to stop bidding on that keyword altogether.
If you don't have access to information such as this, it's very easy to waste a large part of your budget on clicks that aren't providing a return.
You can also change your Adwords campaigns to only show your ads at certain times of day based on the data from Google Analytics.
Are you making the most common Adwords mistake?
The biggest mistake made by small businesses when it comes to Adwords is just setting up a campaign and then leaving it alone.
You need to be constantly tweaking your campaigns to get the most from them and that's where linking to Google Analytics can help.
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