Understanding Google Ads Analytics Reports

“Get the Facts, Be Sure and then Decide.” Ezra Taft Benson

Picture the scene: It’s 10am on a Monday and you’re sitting in a meeting room surrounded by tired-looking colleagues, all hoping the speaker will hurry up already because it’s time for some coffee. Someone proposes a solution based on the latest data and you can feel the collective sense of relief that finally, a decision can be made. Coffee time?

Not so fast!

Generally, the client makes a claim based on web analytics data and wants to jump right into action and use it to make a business decision. But here’s the catch, often the data isn’t telling them the story they think it is and they’re actually jumping into a decision that may cost them dearly. That’s why I take my role of challenging them very seriously, so we can end the meeting confident that we are on the right path.

A similar situation might arise when you work with your Google Ads and Google Analytics data separately. Individually each of them might not give the insights on how your campaigns are working, or how is site is working, or which keywords are leading to engagement and which are leading to conversions and many more. Google Ads is great at telling you how much money your ads cost and how many conversions you’re getting but what happens between the click and the conversion remains a mystery unless you add Google Analytics to the equation. It can tell you what people do on your site, so if they’re not converting, it can help you find out why. And when you can fix conversion rate issues, your Google Ads performance will get better.

This blog will give all the information that is required for you to know about Google Ads Analytics reports. To get a more clearer picture about these reports, this blog is divided into the following sections:

I. Why and how should you link your Google Ads and Analytics account?

II. About Google Analytics data in Google Ads reports

III. Analyzing Google Ads Analytics data

IV. Acting on Google Ads Analytics Reports data

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I. Why and how should you link your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts?

A. Why should you link your accounts?

Linking your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts is an important practice to ensure the two measurement tools can work together to help you get the most from your advertising. The bottom line is that linking Analytics and Google Ads gives you powerful information that can tell you where you should be spending more or less based on real ROI data. When you link accounts, the data can flow both ways – from Google Analytics to AdWords (for example, engagement metrics or remarketing lists), and from Google Ads to Google Analytics (for example your Google Ads cost data).

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In particular, you can take advantage of powerful features such as:

• The ability to dig into campaign/keyword performance by real revenue and cost in Google Analytics.
• Importing goals and e-commerce transactions from Google Analytics into Google Ads.
• Importing Google Analytics metrics like bounce rate, time-on-site, and % new visits into Google Ads.
• Using Remarketing with Google Analytics to more effectively reach your customers.
• Seeing Google Ads data in rich reports such as Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels.

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B. Before you begin

To link Google Ads and Google Analytics, or to unlink or edit your link, you’ll need to use a Google Account with the following permissions to Google Analytics and Google Ads:

1. For the Google Analytics property, you’ll need “Edit” permissions.
2. To check your permissions, in Google Analytics, click on Admin at the top of the page, select the property you want to link, and click on User Management. If you don’t see “User Management” in the property column, ask your account administrator if you have “Edit” permissions.
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3. For the Google Ads account, you’ll need administrative access.
4. To check your account access, click on the gear menu and select Account settings. In the menu on the left, select Account access.

Also, you will have to do the following:

1. Enable auto-tagging in your Google Ads accounts.
2. Link your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts. Make sure you import site metrics for the view you want to see in your Google Ads account.

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C. Linking your Google Ads and Google Analytics account:

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Sign in to your Google AdsGoogle Ads account.

1.Click on the gear menu, then select Linked accounts.

2. Under “Google Analytics”, click on View details. You’ll see a list of the Google Analytics properties to which you have access. (If you don’t see an Analytics property here, make sure that you have “Edit” permission to that property.)

3. Click on Set up link next to the property that you want to link to Google Ads. Choose a property for the business that you advertise with Google Ads. (You’ll be able to link more than one.)

4. Now you’ll see one of the two screens described below:

• If the property you chose only has one view, then you’ll see the name of that view. Select Import site metrics to be able to see Google Analytics data in Google Ads reports.
• If the property has multiple views, then you’ll see a list of the views from this property that you can link. There are two settings:
• Link: Link as many views as you’d like. This will make Google Ads click and cost data available in Analytics, and Analytics goals and transactions available for import into Google Ads.
• Import site metrics: (Recommended) select one view from which to import site engagement metrics. While this is optional, we recommend choosing one view that will be used to show website engagement metrics in the Google Analytics reporting columns of your account.

If your Google Ads account is used by an Google Ads manager account (MCC) that has linked to this property, then you’ll also see a column showing which views are linked to that manager account.

5. Click on Save.

You can repeat this process for any additional properties that you want to link. Despite the accounts being linked, there are a few more steps to accomplish before you see the Analytics data in your Google Ads reports.

• Go to your Google Ads page and select Account Settings by clicking the gear icon.
• Select Linked Accounts.
• Choose up to ten Google Analytics views you want to import data from by clicking Add to the right of the view name.
• Go to the Campaigns page of your Google Ads and click on the Columns button.
• Select Modify Columns from the drop-down menu and locate Google Analytics on the left of side of the column customization menu.
• Click Add for each column you’d like to be able to see and click Apply.

Now that your accounts are linked, you can import Analytics goals and transactions into Google Ads Conversion Tracking and add Google Analytics data such as bounce rate, pages per session and average session duration to Google Ads reports.

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D. Import Analytics goals and transactions into Google Ads Conversion Tracking

First of all, we hope you are already tracking meaningful goals in Google Analytics! These could be donations, event registrations, file downloads, email sign-ups or form completions—whatever it is you are trying to get users to do on your website.t

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Thus, although this chapter is about combining Analytics and Google Ads, and making them work together for the greater good, we can’t proceed telling you all about importing Google Analytics goals and transactions if you don’t know what those are. So, very briefly:

• Analytics goals – A perfect way to measure how well your site/app is at getting people to convert, i.e. make a purchase, complete a level of a game, fill in a contact form and so on.
• Analytics transactions – Also called e-commerce transactions, these allow you to analyze transaction and item data more in-depth, e.g. which products sell better than others; how long does it take for an average person to buy; what’s the revenue from a single transaction and so on.

Now, to import your goals and ecommerce transactions from Analytics into Google Ads Conversion Tracking, the following steps are to be followed:

• After you’ve linked your Google Ads and Analytics accounts, wait 30 minutes for the imports to be ready. Then, sign in to your Google Ads account, click the Tools tab, and select Conversions.
• Click Analytics in the left-hand menu.
• Check the boxes next to the goals or transactions you want to import. Click Continue.
• On the next page, you’ll see settings that will apply to all of the goals or transactions you selected. The categories (Other, Purchase/Sale, Sign up, Lead and View of a key page) will appear under the “Conversion category” segment that you can apply to your Google Ads reports. The conversion window (choose between 7-90 days; the default is 30 days) is the period of time after someone clicks your ad during which a conversion is recorded in Google Ads. Unless you have a logical reason to change it, stick to 30 days. Make your choices, then click Import goals.
• Click Close, or to import more goals, click Import more.

Google Ads

Conversion Tracking starts importing the data from your Analytics account starting from the day you clicked Import. You should see it within two days. But you won’t see historical conversion data. After your goals/transactions are imported, the conversions data will appear next to the existing conversion data on the Conversions page. You can easily adjust and customize the columns for every keyword, ad group and ad. You can also edit your goals without ever having to go over to Analytics. Simply go to Tools, choose Conversions, select which goal you want to edit and click on Edit Settings. This is handy because you can do everything you need to do from just one dashboard without having to go back and forth between Google Ads and Analytics.

Benefits of Having Google Analytics Goals and Transactions on Google Ads

• Visiting just one site to get all your conversion-related info.
• Getting more detailed conversion information simply because more aspects of a conversion are being tracked.
• Having unique data available to you, such as engagement goals (which Google Ads don’t track).
• Lowering Google Ads costs by optimizing bids based on goal and transaction data.
• Ultimately increasing conversions.

II. About Google Analytics data in Google Ads reports

This section will give you an overview of how Google Analytics data can be helpful in your Google Ads account. For that you need to know what metrics you should be looking at in Google Analytics to make better decisions in AdWords:

1. Use the “pages/visit” metric to see if users aren’t finding what your ads are promising.
2. Look at “% new visits” and first-click conversions in search funnels reports to avoid deleting upper funnel keywords.
3. Put a value on keywords that assist conversions with the Model Comparison report.
4. Find landing pages that drag down your account’s performance.
5. Track phone calls and video plays as conversions.
6. See all conversions side-by-side in campaign reports in Analytics.
7. Use the Goal Flow report to find where your Google Ads clicks are falling off in the conversion process.
8. Find the best performing position for your ads with the Keyword Positions report.
9. Track cohorts and understand the value of long-tail keywords with custom segments.
10. Find out quickly if any Google Ads segments are under-performing with Intelligence Events.

Let us know about a few of these metrics in detail that would help us get better results in our Google Ads campaigns .By viewing these Google Analytics site engagement metrics alongside your Google Ads performance stats, you can see what people do after clicking on your ad and reaching your landing page. Here’s the kind of data you can see:

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A. Bounce rate

When someone sees only one page or triggers only one event, Analytics considers this a “bounce.” Your site’s Bounce Rate is the percentage of sessions that are bounces. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps you just did such a bang up job of answering the user’s question, there was no need for them to continue searching on your website.

Bounce rates vary widely based on the industry and the purpose of the page. A retail website driving highly targeted web traffic may see a 20-40% bounce rate while a landing page with a single call to action could see that number climb to 70-90%.

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B. Avg. session duration (seconds)

Session duration is one of the most common metrics used by people and companies to determine the ‘performance’ and quality of traffic being driven to their site. The average session duration allows you to work out what acquisition sources are most effective and is widely regarded as a benchmark KPI to determine whether traffic quality is good or bad. In the digital agency and client arena, session duration is often a talking point as to whether various campaigns are working or not. Often these are compared with ambitious industry benchmarks or specific targets.

An obvious goal you’d like to set for yourself is to increase the sessions on your site over time. It’s best not to dive in head first; create a plan and set (realistic) metrics that you can report on monthly to show progress.

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C. Pages/session

It is the average number of pages viewed during a session on your website. More pages per session means that users are more engaged and exploring more of your site. Visitors should want to view more pages on your site. In order to increase page views, link to other internal pages that provide information pertaining to the content at hand. The more time they spend on your site, the better – so keep users traveling on a journey through your site. Design your page to funnel users into the required course of action. You should never leave the visitor guessing or having to track down a contact form to do business with you.

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D. % new sessions

The estimated percentage of first-time sessions. It’s nice to keep fresh eyes on your content because that means you’re expanding your reach. Ideally, a good website will have a solid mix of new and returning visitors. You can also see the percentage of new visits attributed to each keyword within the report. If this percentage is high for a particular keyword, then you know the keyword is effective at driving new traffic to your site. If the percentage is low but the number of conversions are high for a keyword, the keyword may be effective at driving repeat visits to your site that eventually convert.

This information helps show you how effective your campaigns and ad groups are. And that helps you make decisions about your budgets, bids, landing pages and ad text. For example, viewing an ad group’s bounce rate alongside its click through rate (CTR) can give you a sense of whether your customers are seeing what they expect on your site after clicking your ad.

And That’s Why Google Ads Is Better With Analytics

Now that you know what metrics are to be looked at in Google Analytics, you need to understand what these metrics would add to your campaigns in Google Ads to make them better.

1. Don’t Delete Zero Conversion Keywords

Say you have a bunch of keywords that have 0 conversions. You might be thinking about deleting these or lowering the bids drastically. But keep in mind that the conversions you see in AdWords are last-click conversions, so only the last keyword that got a click in Google Ads will get the credit for the conversion.

Knowing that many consumers do multiple searches while researching a purchase, it’s obvious why making a decision based solely on last-click conversions might be the wrong one. You might be eliminating the keywords that drive upper funnel activity, leaving yourself with fewer users who come out at the end of the funnel too.

Here are two things you can do to check if these are truly bad keywords:

• Check if you have high engagement for these keywords, e.g., high numbers for “avg. visit duration” and “pages/visit,” as this can be an indicator that the problem isn’t with the keywords but rather with your site where the users are not finding what it is you promised them in the ad. After all, a user who spends a lot of time on the site must think they’ve come to the right place, they’re just not finding what they need easily. The solution in this case could be to try more relevant landing pages.
• Look at the column “% new visits” to see if these keywords are driving new users into your funnel. If the keyword drives a lot of new visitors, the next step is to use the Search Funnels report in Google Ads to see if these new users eventually convert using different keywords, or even through different channels.

If this is the case, try to figure out how to value these keywords because eliminating them could really backfire.

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2. Find Bad Landing Pages Quickly

Use the columns “bounce rate” and “avg. time on site” in addition to “conversion rate” to find ads that are neither converting, nor engaging users.

Then analyze the worst offenders and bucket them based on the probable solutions which could be one of the following: fix the keyword relevance, pick a better landing page, fix ads that may be misleading, or if your site has a high bounce rate across the board, address the elements that seem to make users think your site is not trustworthy. While Google Ads provides a good starting point to find poor landing pages, one of the issues is that it’s not good at aggregating the data. To be efficient you should look at the data for landing pages across your whole account.

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3. GA Lets You Track More Complex Conversions

The Google Ads conversion tracking code still serves its purpose well for tracking simple conversions.

However, many advertisers want to track more than just views of a key page like the order confirmation page, e.g., how many people called after visiting your site from an ad, or how many people watched your product demo video. Both of these actions don’t have a corresponding page so tracking is a bit more complex. In the case of tracking phone calls after the ad is clicked, the third-party vendor that handles your call tracking will fire either an event or a virtual page view to GA when a call lasts longer than your specified minimum duration.

That in turn is set as a goal which can then be imported back into Google Ads, and associated back to the Google’s click tracking parameter that helps it uniquely identify every click, so that it shows up as a conversion next to the correct keyword, ad, and ad group. The only real downside of using GA to track conversions is that there is a bit of a delay for when they are imported: normally 24 to 48 hours but sometimes 72 hours! As a result of this delay, your Google Ads CPAs will always look pretty weak for the past 2 days so if you’re trying to manage bids very frequently using only data from Google Ads, you have the added complication of having to account for the delayed conversion data.

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4. When You Have No Macro Conversions, Look At Micro-Conversions

A common problem in Google Ads is that it’s hard to track different types of conversions when you don’t necessarily want to treat all types of conversions the same.

A simple example is that you have two campaigns, one with the goal of selling products, the other with the goal of building your email list. If you track both conversions, both campaigns will reflect both conversion types and it’s hard to segment it back out so that you’re not counting email sign-ups as sales in the campaign that is trying to sell products. There are a few possible solutions in Google Ads, e.g., you can choose to count unique conversions or just converted clicks if you don’t want to double count leads, or you can assign a conversion value of 0 to conversions you don’t want to factor into an ROAS based bid strategy, but sometimes you want something a little more sophisticated.

In Google Ads, it’s just not easy to see data broken out by individual conversions. In Analytics, on the other hand, you can easily customize an Google Ads campaign report to show several types of goals side by side, making it much easier to understand what the users are doing after they click your ad. You can even use this data in cases where you’re not successfully driving the expected conversion. By looking at different conversion types, you’ll see if those keywords are at least driving some sign-ups for the newsletter, or completing another micro conversion on your site, something that still has some value or that could be a predictor of a sale much further down the line.

Once you determine that a particular campaign is a bit weak in terms of driving the completion of conversions, you can compare how different campaigns move users through the stages of your funnel. This can help identify where the users are dropping off. Perhaps there’s one of the pages in the funnel that’s just not working well for some users, for example, if you charge for shipping and you don’t have a cheaper option for the products in your new line of value-oriented products, that could cause a significant drop-off compared to your other product lines.

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5. Being #1 Isn’t Always Great

If you manage Google Ads ads and you’re not the boss at the company, you’ve probably gotten a frantic call from someone higher up the chain to ask: “Why aren’t our ads in position 1 anymore?!?” A good answer would be to explain that ad positions were tested and it was determined that the top slot was not worth the extra cost. Or maybe you can even show that the conversion rates are actually worse at the top of the page than on the right side.

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6. Understand Your Segments

When you have one keyword that you’re managing, you’re really managing that keyword across potentially hundreds of segments. Understanding how each segment performs is crucial to making the right optimizations in your account. The segmentations we all look at include day-parts, geographic regions and devices. While Google Ads does an okay job making these segments accessible, GA does a better job. You can now even build segments to analyze user cohorts, for example, to see what happens with users who first visited in July and saw a particular ad I was running then. Another great benefit of Google Analytics is that you can take any segment and turn it into a remarketing audience list in a single click.

Even though we all understand the power of looking at our data in a segmented way, the truth is that there are too many segments to analyze manually. Analytics has an answer for that, too, and you can use the Intelligence Alerts to let Google do all the hard work for you. You can look at the report and see just data for Google Ads, looking for either things that are unusual over a short period with daily alerts, or looking at longer trends using weekly or monthly reports.

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III. Analyzing Google Ads Analytics Reports

A. Analyzing Google Ads Analytics Reports in Excel

Combining your Google Ads metrics with your Analytics data will allow you to analyze your PPC campaign on many new levels. You’ll never look back! In this section I’ll be detailing how to pull together a keyword report with revenue data, but you could apply this to any account level (campaign, ad group, keyword).

Step 1 – Analytics Custom Report

Build the report you want in Analytics. All your Google Ads data (clicks, impressions, cost, etc.) is actually available to you in Analytics (now that your account is linked to Analytics). On the custom report tab, click the button at the top of your screen to create a new custom report. You’ll want to make sure that you’re creating an Explorer report, and not a Flat Table report, because you’ll be segmenting your data further once it’s created. Essentially, you just want to recreate the metrics available to you in Google Ads in Analytics. Not all metrics are available, but the key ones are.

Step 2 – Export Your Data From Analytics

Okay, this is the only part of this process that can be a little labor intensive if you have a lot of keywords in your account. After you’ve created your report, run it and make sure you’ve set your view to show the maximum number of entries on your screen, 500 (you can change this at the bottom of your report in a small drop down menu). Then go to the top of your screen and click Export, then choose CSV as your file type. Frustratingly enough, Analytics will only export the data that is shown on your screen, so you’ll have to dump your keyword data into your report 500 keywords at a time. Keep things easy for yourself and don’t edit your columns until after you’ve dumped in all your keywords.

Step 3 – Reformat Keywords

To prime your report to merge with the data you’ll be pulling out of Google Ads, you’ll need to format your keywords like the appear in Google Ads with the keyword identifiers for each match type (“phrase”, [exact]). The fastest way to do this is to sort your keywords by match type, then use a blank worksheet to edit. Copy and paste keywords one match type at a time onto your blank worksheet and use the concatenate function in Excel to put parentheses or brackets around your keywords.

Copy your concatenated list and paste back into your original report to overwrite the keywords in your keyword column, but make sure you use Paste Special – Values to only copy in text. Otherwise you’ll paste in your formula, which won’t work since your original data is on another sheet.

Step 4 – Google Ads

Head into Google Ads, and download a keyword report. Make sure your keyword match type is included in the data you export, and also make sure you’ve run the exact date range you used in your Analytics report. Clean up your report by getting rid of of data you don’t need. Copy or move this worksheet into the same Excel file that houses your Analytics sheet.

Step 5 – Combine and Be Amazed

Now it’s time to combine your Google Ads and Analytics reports to have campaign, ad group AND revenue/ROI data for each keyword! To do this, go back to your Analytics sheet and add in columns for the missing Google Ads data you want to add. Make sure that you add the columns in the same order that they appear on your Google Ads report. You’ll need the columns to be in the same place because you’ll be referencing data by column number. A brief note, the CPC shown on your Analytics report is actually your keyword’s avg. CPC, and not your max CPC. I just changed the column title, and then set up my report to pull in the max CPC from my Google Ads sheet. So, I added three columns (campaign, ad group, max CPC).

Now we’ll be using the VLOOKUP function in Excel. After you’ve created your campaign, ad group and max CPC columns, click in the first cell of your campaign column. The VLOOKUP function will match data from another table based on your leftmost column.

If you’re not well versed in Excel functions, just use the Formula Builder in Excel to plug in the correct data. To get to the Formula Builder, go to the Insert menu at the top of your screen and choose Function. Double click VLOOKUP and you’ll get a box that requires you to enter the required content. You’ll just need to tell Excel which cell to try to match (lookup_value), which will be the data in your first column, the range of data to use to match from, the number column of the data you want to display (in this case, campaign, which is column 3). You’ll want to use FALSE as the range_lookup, which will tell Excel to match your keyword value exactly. This is why I had you format your keywords in the same way they’re shown in Google Ads.

Copy your formula down to all rows in your Campaign column. To populate your Ad group and Max CPC columns, simply copy the formula in your campaign column, paste into each subsequent column, and then change the column index number for each column. Congrats! You’ve merged your reports. Just one more small thing to do.

Step 6 – One Last thing

To make your new, combined report workable, you’ll just want to copy and paste your report onto a new sheet to get rid of the formulas. This will make tweaking your data possible, like using the report to do bid changes. To do this, just copy all rows, columns, create a new worksheet and paste as values (Paste Special – Values).

Just a brief note, I wouldn’t recommend trying to do this backward by pulling data via the VLOOKUP function into your Google Ads sheet data. Why? You might have keywords in Google Ads that have not generated data in Analytics yet.

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B. Analyzing Google Ads Analytics Reports using ReportGarden

Having seen the procedure for analyzing the Google Ads and analytics data, we now know handling such large volumes of data would not be comfortable. There will almost certainly be things you can automate to free up your time to work on the strategic and creative elements of your campaigns. ReportGarden, a PPC & Google Ads Reporting Tool, automates a lot of the work of getting all the performance related data of your account data to bubble up important insights about your account performance. You can try the tool for free!

This infographic clearly depicts the steps required to be followed while creating Google Ads Analytics Reports in ReportGarden.

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In order to access the various Custom Google Ads Reports available in ReportGarden, you need to Sign-up with ReportGarden and create your account. And also link your Google Ads account with this account.

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1. Select New Report option available in the Reports option on the left side of the screen.

2. Name your report and select a template that will generate your report in the required format. For example, for this Google Ads Analytics report,we can select Sample Google Ads + Analytics Template from the options available.

Select your Google Ads and Analytics accounts from the drop-down menu and also the time period that you would like to analyze the campaign for.

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Your sample report is created. Each page of the report can be modified according to the interest of the client with various text formats and custom colors with the edit option on the respective pages.

3. This report contains various performance reports like:

• Account performance overview
  
  

• Campaign performance
  
• Click performance
  
  

• Network performance
  
• Keyword performance
  
  

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4. All these performance reports can now be edited based on the requirement of the metrics to be included to understand the insights better.

For example,

• You can track your conversions through these performance reports at the campaign, ad group and ads level as well. In each of the performance report you can edit the attributes to add the conversions metrics and the other metrics related to that.
• From these Google Ads analytics reports you can as well check your account structure so that they don’t have too many duplicate keywords and not too few or too many ad text variations. Also you can check which of these keywords are engaging the users and which of them converting.
• You can also segment the data so that you can look at your data at a granular enough level to get actionable insights based on:
• Device type
• Network
• Click type
• Conversion type
• Conversion name

These performance reports can also be created using the widgets on the right side of the screen and by changing the dimension of the table with reference to the performance report needed.

5. You can also arrange the attributes in each of the tables in ascending/ descending order based on any measure used in it like impressions, clicks, CTR% or others by using the options available in the advanced setting options in the edit menu.

6. You can now analyze each performance report based on the combined metrics involved and improve the performance of your account based on the insights.

C. Performance Metrics in Google Ads Analytics Reports

The Google Ads Analytics reports contain different individual performance reports with various metrics involved to help you understand the performance of your campaigns at a micro level and to help you act on these insights for better performance with better understanding.

1. Account Performance overview Report

This section provides the required information about the performance of your Google Ads and Analytics accounts. It provides an overview of the performance of each of your accounts with respect to the clicks and users in your Google Ads and analytics accounts respectively.

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2. Click Performance Report

Click Performance Report helps you evaluate how well you are communicating with the searcher audience. It can help determine the relevance and effectiveness of your campaign b showing these metrics :

• Clicks
• Impressions
• Conversions
• New users
• New sessions

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The Click performance report includes stats aggregated at each click level and includes both valid and invalid clicks. A high ratio of clicks to impressions is an indication that you are targeting the right audience with appropriate keywords and ad text, and those searchers are responding by clicking through to your site – whereas a low click performance is pointing out that there is some disconnect between you and your audience.

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3. Geographic performance Report

Geographic performance report helps to better understand how your ads are doing in different locations. Location reports in Google Ads can show the places where your customers are physically located or the locations they showed interest in. As with any Google Ads report or new feature, you would want to identify how (and whether) this is actionable. With geographic reporting, one main use of the report (similar to day-parting and demographic reporting) is you can tune budget allocation by geographic regions that are performing well (and those that are under-performing).

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4. Network Performance Report

The Network Performance Report provides the statistics to help you evaluate your ad performance, and audience stats to get even more out of your campaigns. Network Performance Report shows performance based on what network the ads are being shown in, including “Search Partners.” The metrics that Google Ads analytics reports allow you to see to get more insights on your campaigns are:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• CTR%
• Conversions
• Cost
• Total conversion value

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5. Impression Share Performance Report

Impression share report helps you to increase the visibility of your ads, the piece of the market cake you can advertise. It is a great indicator of the strength of your keyword set. If you have a very high Impression Share for both Exact Match and Standard you can feel confident that your coverage is strong. It also helps guide you to expand your keyword set through Search Query Reporting or encourage you to add more negative terms to improve campaign performance. It also helps you to identify areas of missed opportunity due to budget constraints.

The metrics that Google Ads analytics reports allow you to see to get more insights on your campaigns are:

• Search IS
• Search Budget Lost IS
• Search rank lost IS

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6. Conversions Report

Conversion tracking is a powerful tool in Google Ads that lets you identify how well your ad campaign is generating leads, sales, downloads, email sign-ups and other key actions for your business. Now, adding Analytics data into this can give you a more clearer picture of which keyword is leading to conversions and which is leading to engagement. The data recorded by conversion tracking allows you to identify which areas of your campaign are working and not working, so you can optimize your bids, ad text, and keywords accordingly.

The metrics that Google Ads analytics reports allow you to see to get more insights on your campaigns are:

• Clicks
• Converted clicks
• Conversions
• Click conversion rate
• Cost
• Cost/ Conversion

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7. Campaign Performance Report

This report allows you to view performance data for your campaigns. After publishing a campaign, you will have access to performance reporting. It allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign. It allows you to view the performance of your campaign at a “macro” level and then dig into specific marketing pieces (such as emails) in order to see how well they are performing. Adding analytics data helps you look at the data at a micro level and help you understand your campaigns even better. The metrics that can be added are:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions
• Cost
• Average CPC
• Average position

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8. Ad Group Performance Report

This report is crucial as it includes all statistics aggregated by default at the ad group level and gives an overview of the overall performance of the Adgroups. The report tracks statistics like clicks, impressions, and click-through rate which is a great way to start. It’s also important to think about what you’re trying to accomplish with your campaign, so you can focus on the statistics that can help you achieve your goals.

The metrics that Google Ads analytics reports allow you to see to get more insights on your ads are:

• Campaign name
• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions
• Average position
• Cost

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9. Ad Performance Report

This report gives an analysis of how different text, display ads are performing which helps to zero-in on the performance. Advertisers like to analyze how their ads are performing in their campaigns. Sometimes, comparing how a given Text Ad or an Image Ad performs against others will provide insight in creating new ads. Adding analytics data to this will give you great insights on your ads to improve your ads even more with these metrics:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions
• Average CPC
• Average position
• Cost

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10. Keyword Performance Report

You want to review your keywords’ performance to see which ones are helping you meet your advertising goals for your campaigns that target the Google Search Network. The analytics data helps you to make wise decisions about the keywords you might want to delete because of their low conversions. But these might be those keywords that help you get your audience at the first layer of the funnel. From there-on it is how to cater to their needs and how well you have designed your landing pages matter.

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The report shows the particular keywords performance from a specific time period and also shows how keywords are performing by match type. Based on the report, you can also run a keyword diagnosis to review your keyword Quality Score.

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IV. Acting on Google Ads Analytics Reports data

With Google Analytics, you can find insights that matter, including how visitors arrive at your website, how they use it, and how you can keep them coming back. Here are some ways you can take advantage of the new Google Analytics data available in Google Ads to improve your results.

• Attract more engaged users. If highly engaged users are an important goal, sort your ad groups to find the ones that deliver visitors who stay on your site the longest (“Average Visit Duration” or “Pages Per Visit”), and bid more for these.
• Discover opportunities to convert more engaged visitors. You might find certain keywords or ads that have relatively low conversion rates, but great engagement metrics. You could lower your bids by a little and move on. Or you could see this as a great opportunity to convert clearly engaged visitors into buyers. By adjusting your offer, adding an incentive (like a coupon or discount code), or making your call to action more obvious and accessible, you might be able to improve your ROI and your conversion volume. To look for these types of opportunities, create a filter based on conversion rate and sort by Average Visit Duration, Pages per visit, or Bounce Rate.
• Identify ads with badly matched landing pages or inaccurate targeting.Pages with both low conversion rates and low engagement metrics (low Average Visit Duration or High Bounce Rate) could indicate a poor landing page for a particular ad or keyword. It might also suggest inaccurate targeting. To identify and troubleshoot these problems, set up a filter for low conversion rate and low engagement rate and regularly monitor it.

Most of us work pretty hard to build and maintain successful Google Ads campaigns. It makes sense to spend a little extra time to analyze them effectively and report our successes. With these Google Ads Analytics reports when you assess the performance of a keyword or ad, you will have some extra data points about traffic quality. Being able to accurately report on the effectiveness of Google Ads will give your clients and bosses confidence in your ability, and grow support and budget for your efforts.