Dealing With Google AdWords and Analytics Data Discrepancies

A few months ago I wrote a guest post for Portent Interactive about the data discrepancies between Google AdWords and Analytics. It’s still something I deal with every day when trying to analyze and make account decisions and I wanted to share this post with our readers.

In a touching speech by President Jack Nicholson, he asks alien invaders “Why can’t we work out our differences? Why can’t we work things out? Little people, why can’t we all just get along?” Although things didn’t end so well for him, this is often how I feel about the relationship between AdWords and Analytics. They both provide excellent information that is extremely valuable to anyone managing a PPC account, so why oh why can’t they just get along.

Last week I was hit head on with the data discrepancies between the two interfaces when I went to implement ad scheduling for an E-Commerce client. I wanted to analyze hourly performance to determine if there were times throughout the day when we could either reduce bids or pause ads to better utilize our budget. Sounds easy enough right?

I first downloaded conversions by hour in AdWords. Below is a screenshot of the results:

The account is spending the majority of its budget at 12am, at a cost per conversion of $465.89. This amount seems high, especially compared with other hours of the day, but I wanted to know the value of these conversions before I made any decisions. I pulled revenue data by hour from analytics to calculate ROI and this is where things got interesting:

The rows highlighted in yellow are hours in which AdWords recorded conversions, but no revenue was generated. The row highlighted in blue is when AdWords recorded no conversions, but the account brought in almost $300.

This discrepancy is due to the difference in how AdWords and Analytics attribute conversions. AdWords assigns conversions using first click attribution whereas Analytics uses last click attribution. For example, lets say a person clicked on one of our PPC ads, viewed our products, went to a competing site to compare prices, then came back to make a purchase by typing our website into the search bar. AdWords would attribute the conversion to the time the PPC ad was clicked. Analytics however would attribute it as a direct goal conversion.

This is where I had to look at the whole picture and start making some decisions. We were spending a lot of money at 12am, but I didn’t want to completely turn off ads at this time.  Some of those clicks were turning into conversions at some point throughout the day. I just wasn’t able to tie this information to revenue Analytics.

Ultimately I decided to decrease bids during hours with a high cost per conversion, whether revenue was generated or not. I only turned off ads during times when no conversions or revenue was reported. I also decreased bids for any hours where revenue was less than cost. Bids were left at 100% for all other hours of the day.

Even though AdWords and Analytics data will never match up, it is important to look at both before making account decisions. Using just one or the other only shows you a part of account performance. Maybe one day these two will learn to get along but until then we will have to use the data available and our best judgment when making changes to our PPC accounts.

17 Tips for Facebook Advertising Success

1. Targeting strategy should map your search strategy.

2. Tremendous value can be gained by setting traditional (ROI-centric) campaign goals (such as direct sales and site traffic) for your Facebook advertising efforts.

3. Tailor your ads to your segments, first create your segment.

4.Begin with building a placeholder ad that meets Facebook’s guidelines, including a full headline and full sentence in the body. Use a live URL; don’t use symbols or excessive punctuation or capitalization.

5.  Don't rely on Facebook’s suggested ad as it will typically get disapproved.

6. Always include competitor or related brand names that would be of interest to your target audience for likes & interest targeting.

7. Always start with root interest first while choosing keywords (i.e., “football,” followed by “fantasy football” or “Super Bowl XLV”)

8. For new customers or fans, focus on Facebook profiles which are not already connected to your group or page.

9.  Use the “visible to connection” tag to deliver unique content – including coupons, trials, samples, events, sneak previews and sales –to users who are already connected to your page and to show a completely different code to those who haven’t yet liked your page.

10. Keep changing the image, headline and copy regularly. Roll out periodically and manually rotate your Facebook ads.

11. Click-through rates are much higher for ads with images than for those that are text only.

12. Your highest-performing paid search terms can give you a head start in determining relevant keywords for use as Likes and Interests. Focus on topics and themes rather than individual terms when translating from search to Likes and Interests.

13. Test creative early and often. Winning images are not necessarily the most aesthetically pleasing; rather, they are the ones that grab the most attention.

14. Avoid grouping related but not similar interests (for example, “solar energy” and “green energy” are similar but not related, while “green energy” and “wind energy” are related)

15. Don’t think of Facebook programs as campaigns; think of them as AdGroups.

16. If you are running a traditional online marketing campaign and driving traffic to Facebook while also running a specific Facebook campaign, keep your campaigns (and your metrics) distinct.

17. By estimating CPM and the average number of friends a fan may have, you can get a reasonable estimate of what it would have cost to run an actual online ad campaign of the same reach.

Facebook: The Boon of “Like” Marketing

The most important feature of Facebook is its Multiplier Effect. This is the Feature that the messages you send have the potential to spread not just to fans but to friends of fans.

The most important effect of Facebook Marketing is that a marketing message will not just hit one person but their friends too.In Addition to this the third party validation(friend's) makes this more trusted and reliable too.

What is IP address exclusion?

This is a boon from Google Adwords apart from the Location & Language targeting. We can exclude upto 100 Internet Protocol Address per  campaign. We can refine our targeting with this specified feature of Adwords. We can specify the IP's where we don't want our ads to be appeared. All ads within the campaign will not get displayed for the IP that are excluded.
But We should be very careful while using this feature because some large internet providers use a range of IP addresses an many of the internet users use them as the proxy so while blocking them the users using that IP as proxy will also not be able to see the ads.

Do Enhanced CPC helps to Increase the ROI & Conversion?

A new automatic bidding feature in Adwords named as Enhanced CPC helps us to increase the ROI & Conversion.Now the question arises that how the Enhanced CPC adjusts the bidding at the real time, so it is done by the historical performance of the Conversion Tracking. It increases or decreases your Max CPC according to the historical data of the conversion tracking tool.It adjusts your Max CPC based on the likelihood that our ad gets converted.



How It Acts?

Let us elaborate this through a example let i have the keywords seo services, seo services india, best seo services each having bid of $0.30 Now if a user is searching for the keyword "seo services india" and adwords tracks that this keywords had performed well for me in the past and was converted well then increases the bid to $0.32 for the specific auction ,So if the conversion is very high the Enhanced CPC can increase the bid upto 30%.
                                                On the other side if any keyword had not performed well in the past then the bidding can be decreased upto $0.20. So in the mentioned way Enhanced CPC helps to increase the sale and improve the CPA.

 

Site and Category Exclusion

Beyond keyword bids, with the Content Network we also are given the option to exclude certain sites that are either irrelevant or are not performing. We can just exclude those websites which are not generating conversion and just increasing the spend. We should always keep in mind that content network campaigns are of high volume and can cause a lot of spend so we should analyze them very specifically. We can use the "Site & Category Exclusion" that is mentioned in the Reporting and Tools to just block the websites on which we don't want that our ads get on.
                                       Once we get the proper understanding of the performance of the campaign we should do this exclusion practice on a regular basis.

How to work on Google Content Network?

A basic problem which a new advertiser faces while working with Google Adwords is to find success on Google Content network. It can be little dicey but if you just work intelligently on it, will act as a boom for your advertising.It can help a lot to new advertisers to expand the reach of the websites. Before you just hit for content network you should be aware of the fact that it will drastically increase the number of impressions, which overall decrease the CTR of the campaign and leads towards a much lower conversion  rate.
                                                                Therefore what i will suggest is to go for a new separate campaign for content and search network.so that we can track what is going on and manage it easily and effectively.



There are different approaches through which we can take over the content network and generate fruitful results to improve the performance of the campaign.
1) We can choose the keywords and select automatic placement and google will itself match the theme and will show the ads on the same theme websites matching with the theme of the keywords.
2) Instead of using keywords we cain select the placement through which we can just show our ads on the selected websites. We can make this step easier by using the "Placement tool" given in the Reports & Tool Section of Google Adwords.
3)We can combine both the keywords and placement to show our ads on relevant websites.

Now the Question arises that how to manage the bids in a content network? So just as we manage the bids in the search campaign in the similar way we can just work out in content network.But it is more challenging here because in content network we can not check the performance at keyword level we will have to check out at adgroup level so we should be very cautious.