Guidelines on Measuring Sitelinks in AdWords and Google Analytics

Tracking Sitelinks in Google Analytics: What is Google Conversion Tracking? This essentially informs you of your prospects once you’ve interacted with your ads.

Conversion is when the prospect has completed an action that has been defined as valuable. Conversion lets you know if the ad campaigns are amounting to something or the advertising budget has gone down the drain.

Some of the advantages to using conversion tracking is that:

• Identification of keywords, ad groups, ads and campaigns that will increase conversions.

• It promotes informed decision making concerning spending on ad campaign optimization.

• Provision of insight on ad optimization to provide a boost for a return of investment (ROI).

• Helps in knowing the effectiveness of the ad in drawing customer activity.

Reasons for Linking Google Analytics With Adwords

Once an analytics account is set up on a site, customer interaction data is made available.

The analytics accounts should be linked so that the ad performance is visible on Google analytics together with the other site data, the goals, metrics and transaction data can be imported and to receive data that is richer from analytics multi-channel reports.

Measuring Site-links Performance

Site-links are basically ad extensions that are links and located below the traditional ad and are used to help users navigate to destinations that are quite specific.

They especially useful in increasing ad visibility, CTR, quality score as well as user experience while using simple actions. Site-link performance can be measured in a number of ways.

1. AdWords ad Extensions Tab

In a campaign, first navigate to the extensions tab, then the site-links extension as seen below:

From the image, performance metrics are not specified to the sitelink. CTR is only visible for ads where the sitelink made an appearance. Ads are able to display sitelinks at one-time.

This is a common occurrence especially in cases where the campaigns have many sitelinks. They mostly offer impressions, clicks, and conversions as they serve together in ads. Rotate the reports as it is valuable in the presence of more than 6.

2. AdWords Sitelink Segmentation

One needs to access the Ad extensions tab locate the drop down then select the type of segmentation wanted.

Avoid forming decisions from sample sizes that are too small. Use several to enhance confidence in the data.

3. Google Analytics Parameters

These methods need the addition of parameters to the sitelink destination URLs through the use of a format like sitelink.

When attaching parameters for tracking to a URL, one should remember to use ‘?’ while separating the URL from tagging in cases where the URL has no question mark but if it does have one, the URL should be separated from the parameter using ‘&’ regardless of whether the URL already has it.

After proper placement of the parameters and a walkthrough to confirm proper functioning of the link, the sitelink data can be viewed from Google analytics by heading to behavior followed by site contents then afterward the landing pages.

Head to the search box and search for the designated parameters. From there you can head further into the interface of Google Analytics to get additional data regarding sitelinks. The data could be such as the campaigns that triggered them and many more.

The query parameters that have been extended to the URLs are expected to result in the All Pages report breaking into several rows, and this is not a preferred practice.

A separate view can be made for the traffic caused by Paid Search then filtering could be done to rid the sitelink parameters from the main views.

Filtering could be done further by separation into various other dimensions to avoid the cluttering of URLs of another person. It would require manual editing of the said sitelinks.

Use these high-converting landing pages to boost your success

Reasons for Linking Google Analytics to Your Website

Below are reasons why clients should link up to a website’s Google Analytics profile:

•All the important AdWords data will be easily seen while using Analytics: Once the two accounts belonging to Google are linked, AdWords data can be found within Analytics provided tagging has been done either through auto-tagging or manual tagging.

This ensures that it is simple to determine what campaigns and keywords are bringing about direct traffic when compared to others as well as the comparison of traffic with other types of traffic sources.

• Analytics data in its entirety will be visible from AdWords: It is the thought of most advertisers that through the setup of conversion tracking, visibility of what keywords are working and which ones aren’t, will not be fully visible.

Through linking of Analytics to Google AdWords, related data such as bounce rate, average time on site will be visible and if the conversion of the ads is not taking place, one can carry out further analysis can be carried out to determine the actions of the user once they gain access to the site.

One can only know if they are engaging with the site even though they are not converting only if the two accounts are linked.

• It simplifies the importation of goals, e-commerce data into AdWords acquired from Analytics that can be used for the tracking of conversions:

It can sometimes prove to be quite the challenge whenever one wants to add conversation tracking code to a site for a large number of reasons. Google Analytics renders such an action unnecessary.

With Google analytics, simplicity comes about when destination URL goals can be set up, in cases where there is the presence of a thank you page, or in relation to ecommerce sites, the analytics sale data can be easily acquired to determine what keywords and are ads are bringing about sales as well as leads.

• It simplifies remarketing: The addition of code to a site can prove challenging. Remarketing the audience through the use of Google Analytics is possible on the condition that the two accounts are linked.

It can be done simply by accessing the admin area of analytics, selecting the drop-down present at the audience definitions, heading to Audiences, New Audiences, and then one will be made available in AdWords allowing for additions to the remarketing display campaigns.

Take note of the sitelinks being linked. There are sitelinks reports that outline the sitelinks being clicked on and directing people to the site.

The info can be found in Google Analytics but not in AdWords. There is information regarding sitelinks but if only the sitelink was present and not on one particular sitelink. This makes it a useful report when accessed.

• Exploration of trends using AdWords treemaps visually: The tree can be found in the AdWords section of Google Analytics. They permit the exploration of trends present in AdWords campaigns such keywords and many more. They also factor within AdWords and Analytics metrics.

The data tends to be presented through the use of colored rectangles with the rectangle size representing its primary metric and the color the secondary metric.

• It eases the tracking of goals and conversions: Through the Google Analytics, it is easy to take note of the keywords that are bringing about their own conversions in analytics while tracking.