When Google Adwords campaigns don’t look profitable anymore you need to take advantage of Google Analytics, because GA2 is the ultimate weapon.

Basic settings are straightforward and clear. What is not that obvious is advanced optimization and somewhat hidden toolbox of the Adwords pros, allowing them to turn almost any ad campaign into the ultimate winner over the long term.

These subtle settings and changes let advertisers optimize their ad campaigns to the point, when you basically advertise your offer specifically:

• to the right people
• at the right time
• through the exact keyword
• at the right spot
• with the right ad text copy
• for the right type of an offer

Now let’s dig some details of how it is possible and why you cannot do without these optimizations under growing market competition.
If you utilize free Google Analytics system for your statistical, analytical and reporting needs, you will be getting vital data which let you optimize your profitability at the ultra levels.

“To the right people”

First step is segmenting your audience by geography.
Google Analytics lets you discover exact cities people are coming from to your site and most important is to locate those places your orders are coming from.

See GA Report:
1) Go to “Visitors” > “Map Overlay”
2) Set Detail Level: City
3) Open “Goal Conversion” tab

If all your orders for the last year came from 19 major cities and the rest couple of hundred cities or regions just cost you money, maybe it’s a good idea to optimize your Adwords campaign using geo targeting EVEN if you offer a nation-wide product just for the sake of higher CTR and extra clicks what will reduce the costs and gain you an advantage over your competition at the same time.

“At the right time”

Discovering buying time patterns in your clients’ behavior is our second step of ultimate optimization.

See GA Report:
1) Go to “Visitors” > “Visitor Trending” > “Visits”
2) View by: Daily and Hourly
and
1) “Goals” > “Total Conversions”
2) View by: Daily and Hourly

You may discover that 90% of your buyers do not place their orders from 3-5 p.m. and 20-21p.m. and that Mondays bring you least quality traffic and almost no income versus costs.

This will probably let you segment your incoming orders and buyers by hours and days in order to focus your Advertising campaign even further once again to raise overall conversions statistics and all the benefits which came along with it.
Just visit Adwords Campaign advanced settings page and turn your “Ad scheduling” on for setting up special ad scheduling tactics.

“Exact keyword we need”

When you explore a new market niche your initial list of keyword in most cases is far from perfect. Only marketing tests, collected statistics and captures of actual keyword searches can say for sure which keywords drive money and which drive expenses.

Apart from fundamental Adwords reports section, you may also browse through performance of your ad keywords in your Google Analytics account:
1) Traffic Sources -> Adwords -> Adwords Campaigns
2) Segment: ‘Keyword’
3) Tab: ‘Goal Conversion’

This report will show your underperforming keywords as well as those top performing ones which you will want to place in separate ad groups, set on special budgets and target further for the extreme show.

“At the right spot”

You probably know that high ad position in Google results doesn’t guarantee high ROI. Actually the opposite is closer to the truth for a logical reason. A person clicking on your ad on a 4th or 6th position may be more interested in a subject than all the traffic you will naturally capture being on the 1st or 2nd spot from the top.

Now every niche is different and no one knows for sure what consumer market has in mind. For this very reason we, marketers, refer to almighty Google Analytics.

See GA Report:
1) Report: ‘Traffic Sources’ -> ‘Adwords’ -> ‘Keyword Positions’
2) ‘Position Breakdown’ dropdown menu: “Bounce Rates”, “Goal Conversion Rates”

If volume of traffic is too important for your and competition allows, you may neglect this data, otherwise no need to remind you that paying for keyword positions that doesn’t convert is not a good idea.
Enable ‘Position preference’ in your Ad Campaign settings page in your Adwords account and set exact positions for each keyword to start paying for results only and paying less at the end.

“With the right ad text copy”

See which ad headlines brought about the most sales. You will see that not always highest CTR ads bring adequate amount of profits, while worse performing ad converts like a blockbuster.

Again apart from Adwords reports, you can identify top ads by their headlines using Analytics reports.
1) Reports: Traffic Sources -> Ad versions
2) Tab: ‘Goal Conversion’

Take the top ad as a pattern. Check top competition ads and make a couple of variations to test them one against the other.
No point to mention what effect high ad CTR will make on your overall advertising campaign performance and CPCs.

“The right type of offer”

For a good measurement of user experience we take two reports called ‘Bounce rates’ and ‘Time on page’. The former shows a percentage of people, who left your page immediately after coming to it and the later report – how much time they spent on each page of your site. Another useful report of this nature is ‘Top Exit Pages’ showing a percentage of people, leaving your site from each page.

Having collected enough statistics over several months we could make quite true assumptions about whether your content satisfies visitors or not and which pages should be dealt with as soon as possible.
1) Reports: ‘Content’ -> ‘Top Content’
2) Columns: ‘Time on Page’, ‘Bounce Rate’ and ‘% Exit’
3) Report: ‘Content’ -> ‘Site Overlay’

Knowing the least interesting for visitors pages helps you identify real bottlenecks and black holes of your site, so you can better tune them up in your chain of ‘keyword’ = ‘ad text’ = ‘landing page’ in a most favorable way for a visitor.

Your consumer market may actually tell you what it wants if you use another fantastic tool by Google for website optimization called Website Optimizer, which lets you conduct automatic split or multivariate tests on your web pages and find these winning combinations of headlines, text and graphics that convert extremely well, but this is a good subject for another post.

Final Notes

Described optimization tactics will help you make strategic decisions regarding your advertising ROI. If you implement even some of them you will see quite a leap in your ROI stats. Share your results and findings.

What we have discussed works great with paid advertising campaigns, but no one forbids to use the same invaluable data to optimize any of your other traffic generation campaigns starting from banner ads and ending with article marketing or even offline PR campaigns, just make sure you add proper Filters to your Google Analytics account to focus your analysis on what it is really important. Analyzing wrong data will make it impossible to come up with right conclusions and optimization strategies.

If you are an affiliate marketer, you obviously cannot add your tracking code to the merchant landing pages you promote or check out their Analytics reports. In this case you may benefit from NeoPerformancer – adwords optimization system with the help of which you can automatically assign special tracking codes for each keyword/site and do most of the vital research and optimization we’ve just talked about.