Google Announced recently that they will begin to block sending keyword data from Google Adwords to 3 party providers, including Google Analytics.
As a data analyst, one of my roles is crunching numbers to help businesses make data driven decisions. In order to do that, I depend on having as access to as much data as possible.
Search terms are still available in Adwords and you can still get conversion data on your site, but you can’t see on-site performance metrics like the ones you’ll find in Google Analytics.
In Google Analytics, your able to see visit duration, bounce rate, goal completions, event tracking and you can even break out search terms by new and returning visits. Analyzing your search terms in this fashion gives you a much more holistic way of looking at your data. In Analytics, we can see if a search term has a high bounce rate and add as a negative keyword if so.
Going forward, we’re only able to see part of the picture. Google has announced that you can use the ValueTrack parameters if you want to pass keyword data to Google Analytics. Remember, this is the keyword your bidding on in Adwords, not the search term that triggered it. This can be helpful if you’re using call tracking services like CallRail. An example of your new destination url would be: http://www.example.com/?keyword={keyword}&matchtype={matchtype}.
Personally, I want to be as granular as possible when bidding on keywords in Adwords. Knowing which search terms have a high bounce rate or a low goal completion rate or ecommerce transaction rate is really important. Now we’re just making a decision on half of our data.
At Fastpivot we work with ecommerce stores so our decision making can be a bit easier. If a search term hasn’t resulted in a transaction in the past 30, 60 or 90 days we can add it as a negative keyword and we won’t waste money on it.
It’s interesting how Google seems to being replacing our scalpels with butter knives. We lose the option to have mobile only campaigns but we gain bid modifiers based on device and location.
We’re exploring using the Search Funnel report more heavily in Adwords now. Since we have a strategy to flesh out search terms into keywords with specific match types, we can use this report to help identify the right bids for the right keywords.
