Rick Whittington Consulting

Companies have been throwing money down the drain using Google Adwords for years, partly because they use broad match for their ad campaigns.  Even if you’ve discovered exact match and phrase match options in Google Adwords, wouldn’t it be great to see the visitor’s actual search query in Google Analytics?  Here’s a tip — albeit an advanced one — to get real keyword detail from your Google Adwords campaign using Google Analytics.

First, though, I’ll start with why this is important.  These are in no particular order.

1. Keyword detail helps you discover negative match options. If you’re bidding on “dog food” and someone searches for “how to make your own dog food,” your ad is going to appear.  You may be selling dog food, and a visitor like this is not going to find information on your site on how to make dog food.  You don’t want that click.  After seeing this keyword detail in Google Analytics would perhaps want to add “make” as a negative match option for that ad group.  This helps you hone in on buying traffic that’s going to convert, making your campaign more profitable.
2. You’ll get revenue and conversion rate data on every search, which helps you make decisions about the keywords that you are bidding on.
3. It may help you generate ideas for new products, services, blog posts or other search phrases that pertain to your site but you haven’t thought of yet.

For a step-by-step explanation of how to set this up, browse over to the Get Elastic ecommerce blog and read the instructions.