Paid search analytics: What treasures are hiding in your data?
On the surface, paid search analytics seems pretty straightforward. You just drop a code snippet on your page and go, right?
Unfortunately, while setting up paid search analytics is fairly simple, using that data in a way that benefits your business can be quite challenging. Few people get into marketing because they think, Gee, I sure love number crunching!
However, while setting up and evaluating analytics data may not be the sexiest part of marketing, if you aren’t taking the time to understand your paid search analytics, you could be missing major opportunities in your paid search account.
To show you why, let’s take a look at some case studies.
A few months back, we started working with a new client. They had spent about $50,000 on AdWords over the course of about seven months, and their account seemed to be in decent shape. Things were working acceptably well, but they were hoping that we could help them take things up a notch.
In addition to paid search, this client had also hired an SEO agency and invested quite a bit into driving organic traffic to their site. That seemed to be working fairly well, too, so it looked like everything was running smoothly.
Well, looks can be deceiving.
Although they were technically “tracking conversions” in Google Analytics, they hadn’t kept a close eye on how GA was attributing those conversions and didn’t realize that a lot of paid search leads were being improperly attributed to organic traffic. In addition, they weren’t tracking calls — one of their most important sources of leads.
As a result, we initially had a bit of a hard time optimizing the campaigns. We’d make strategic moves in their AdWords account, and… organic leads would increase.
The longer we worked on the account, the more frustrated we became. Something just didn’t seem right. Finally, we convinced the client to let us set up call tracking and take a hard look at their Google Analytics configuration. Once we saw what the situation was, it didn’t take us long to figure out the problem and get things sorted out.
That was when things got interesting.
Before we fixed their conversion tracking, our paid search campaigns were averaging around 28 leads per month. That meant our cost per lead was about $286:
After we fixed the attribution problem, the same campaigns drove 129 leads at a cost per lead of $73:
Now, admittedly, some of that increase was due to the fact that we were now tracking phone calls. However, the combination of inaccurate attribution and incomplete conversion tracking meant that our client had been underestimating their paid search performance by a significant amount.
And, to make things even better, now that we could actually see which keywords, ads and campaigns were driving conversions, we were able to start optimizing their AdWords account.
In less than five months, we more than doubled their conversion volume while cutting their cost per lead by around 20 percent.
But imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t invested time into looking at this client’s analytics setup. No matter what we did, we never would have been able to drive decent results, and SEO would have kept looking more and more effective.
After a few months, the client might have given up on AdWords entirely in favor of driving more organic traffic only to discover that — inexplicably — their SEO lead volume disappeared! However, by taking the time to assess and refine their analytics setup, we were able to identify the true source of their leads and use that information to deliver even better results from their AdWords account.
A couple of years ago, I did an audit for a potential client. Unlike the client in the preceding example, this company had good analytics data — they just weren’t using it effectively.
