Improving Your Marketing Initiatives - Google AdWords Learning Center

The reports in the Traffic Sources section are designed to help you evaluate the value of your marketing initiatives. You can see which marketing initiatives, such as paid keywords, unpaid keywords, paid ads, and referrals from other sites, generate the most business for your site.

Most of the reports in this section include three tabs: Site Usage, Goal Conversion, and Ecommerce.
The Goal Conversion tab focuses specifically on conversions. The tab includes the following metrics:

Visits: the number of visits from each campaign or source, etc. Note that this is different than the number of visitors. For example, the report might show 3 visits, but the site may have only received 2 visitors (since one visitor may visit twice).

Goal1, Goal2, etc.: These columns show your conversion rates for each goal that you have defined.

Conversion Rate: The percentage of visits which resulted in a conversion to at least one of your goals.

Per Visit Goal Value: Non-ecommerce revenue divided by Visits. For example, if Goal 1 has an assigned value of $10 and there were two conversions, the total revenue is $20. If there were 20 visits, the revenue-per-visit would be $1. This metric will always be 0 unless at least one of the goals has an assigned value. You can assign values to each goal in the Conversion Goals and Funnel settings, from the Analytics Settings link.

Note: If you have an ecommerce site and you have added the appropriate ecommerce transaction code to your web pages, you will see Per Visit Value on the Ecommerce tab instead of Per Visit Goal Value on the Goal Conversion tab. Per Visit Goal Value is the average of total goal revenue across all visits; Per Visit Value is the average of total ecommerce revenue across all visits.

Use the Goal Conversion tab metrics to determine which marketing initiatives are most effective. For example, you can stop paying for ads which have low conversion rates. You may also find it interesting to compare your unpaid referrals to each other and to your paid initiatives.

One large online electronics company uses the All Traffic Sources report to evaluate which online marketing program is working best. By selecting 'Medium' from the Show menu within the report, they can compare the effectiveness of CPC traffic (i.e. AdWords and other cost per click traffic), online ads, an email newsletter and an extensive affiliate advertising network. Because they are most interested in conversions, they use the Goal Conversion tab on the report to evaluate the traffic.

One major web property owner has 15 different sites and relies heavily on affiliate marketing. The owner likes to see which landing pages work best for each affiliate. To see the landing pages to which a specific affiliate is driving traffic, she uses the Referring Sites report and, in the report table, clicks on the affiliate site for which she wants data. Once the Referring Site report for that affiliate appears, she selects 'Landing Page' from the Segment menu. This displays a list of the landing pages to which the affiliate sent traffic. The metrics on the Ecommerce tab allow her to quickly see which landing pages are working best for that affiliate.

You will typically use the Keywords report or the AdWords reports to evaluate keywords. The Keywords report allows you to evaluate traffic for both paid and unpaid keywords. You use the Show links (directly above the scorecard) to select "paid", "unpaid", or "total" (both paid and unpaid) keywords. The Keywords report shows all of your keywords across all search engines. As with most other reports in the Traffic Sources section, you can use the Site Usage, Goal Conversion, and Ecommerce tabs to assess the quality of the traffic.

The AdWords reports are provided specifically to help you evaluate and optimize the traffic you receive from AdWords. AdWords Campaigns (and the two associated detail reports: AdWords Ad Groups and AdWords Keywords) have an extra tab called Clicks which provides ROI metrics. You will see data on the Clicks tab as long as you have properly linked your AdWords and Analytics accounts. Impressions, Clicks, Cost, CTR (Click Through Rate), and CPC (Cost Per Click) are imported automatically from your AdWords account. RPC (Revenue Per Click), ROI, and Margin compare your AdWords costs with your revenues. Comparing the ROI of different keywords, for example, enables you to determine where you get the best value.

One large shoe seller uses the data from the Goal Conversion tab in the AdWords Campaigns (and the two associated detail reports: AdWords Ad Groups and AdWords Keywords) reports to identify the keywords that convert most effectively to the "purchase complete" goal. The marketing manager places the top performing keyword in a preferred campaign with a higher budget and moves the lower performing keywords into a lower spending campaign.

The Keywords Positions report shows how position on the search engine result page correlates with Visits, Pages/Visit, Per Visit Goal Value, Revenue, and other metrics. For example, you can find out whether your site received more traffic from the keyword "running shoes" when your ad was in position 2 versus when it was in position 3. You can also find out whether conversion rates are higher for position 2 than position 1. If you notice that, for specific keywords, your conversion rates are the same for all positions, but that you receive less traffic and revenue for the lower positions, you may wish to bid for the lower positions but increase your spend so that your ad is displayed more frequently.