Analyze your Google Adwords Campaigns with Zoho Analytics

Google Adwords has become a very important advertising medium for all advertisers & marketing professionals. As one using Google Adwords, you should be analyzing your various campaigns, adgroups, ads etc constantly. But the readymade reports provided by Google Adwords are pretty rudimentary and have the below disadvantages.

• There aren’t actually many report options. The report consists of rows of data which you can see as HTML or export as a csv/xls files.
• The only chart option given plots only one metric (CPM, Clicks, CTR etc) at a time.
• The chart and the data are separate and this means you can’t drill down a chart to see the underlying data.
• The reports don’t allow you to compare how two different campaigns are performing. Or how a campaign in July 2009 (current month) performed as against June 2009 (previous month) or July 2008 (same month, previous year).
• The charts cannot be saved for referencing anytime later.
• The charts cannot be shared or collaborated upon online.

With Zoho Analytics, you can do a lot of analysis with the data provided by Google Adwords. Multiple metrics can be plotted and studied. Comparisons between campaigns can be done and a campaign can be compared to how it had performed across different time lines (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or even yearly). Based on such analysis, you can take actions to reduce costs and get higher returns for the money you spend on Google Adwords.

Let’s see in this post how Zoho Analytics can help you analyze various campaigns & allow you to get the maximum bang for your buck (lower costs, more conversions etc). Embedded below are charts with real data from a Google Adwords account that we have set up. The campaigns have been renamed generically as for mountain bikes. There are 3 campaigns being run, one in the US, one in Europe and one comprising of other countries in Australasia and Africa since Jan 2007.

The above chart shows the avg cost / conversion trends across the various campaigns.

This chart shows how the CTR has varied over the months for the three campaigns. The above two examples compare how various campaigns are performing with respect to each other. We can also compare how a campaign’s various metrics have performed over time.

The above chart plots the impressions vs clicks for the Europe campaign over the past year. If pretty charts aren’t your cup of tea, you can make pivot tables. Like this one for example, which plots the quarterly conversions for the campaigns.

The embedded reports above are just a few samples. The original database with a slew of reports for the three example campaigns are available here – http://reports.zoho.com/ZDBDataSheetView.cc?DBID=4000000163350. You can play around the data, create as many reports as you want and see for yourselves how flexible and powerful your Adwords Campaign data
becomes, when using the right business intelligence tool.

Most importantly, all these set of campaign-level reports are readily available for your Google Adword analysis. All you have to do is to follow the easy steps as mentioned in this page and you can have the same reports as above for your Google Adwords campaigns as well. We are planning to make this easier further by providing a direct Zoho Analytics connector to your Google Adwords account soon.

Next, we’ll see with examples how to analyze your Google Adwords campaigns at the Adgroups level.