This is a guest post written by Jan-Willem Ligtelijn of the Sir Miles B.V. agency.
One of the key features of the combination of Google AdWords and Google Analytics is the way you can view the customer journey from the very first click on your AdWords campaign advertisement towards a conversion. Google Analytics even gives you financial statistics on how much money you’ve spent based on specific keywords.
Sure, you can view your campaign click-throughs in Piwik PRO, but there was no easy way to compare Piwik campaign statistics with the source (AdWords).
However, the recent launch of the AdWords integration by Piwik PRO has advanced the features of Piwik PRO a great deal. Now there’s no excuse not to use Piwik PRO as a Google Analytics alternative when it comes to tracking your AdWords results. Here’s how to get started on maximizing your AdWords campaign ROI with Piwik PRO.
How to Setup AdWords Campaign Tracking in Piwik PRO
By installing the Piwik PRO AdWords plugin you can track as many AdWords campaigns as you like. Manage campaign costs and get detailed information on every keyword ROI.
Are you managing more than one website within your Piwik PRO instance? Do you want to link specific AdWords campaigns to specific websites? No problem! You can add as many AdWords campaigns as you like with a simple wizard. Are you a Piwik PRO Cloud user and is your AdWords plugin not activated yet? Just let the Piwik PRO team know that you want to activate it through the chat service in your account and it will be done for you as soon as possible…
Setup is easy. You only need your AdWords Customer ID. You can find it on the top right corner when you’re logged into your AdWords account. The sequence looks like this: 000-000-0000. If you manage more than one AdWords account, you can find your customer id in the top left corner when you select the appropriate customer. (e.g. Customer – 000-000-0000).
In your Piwik PRO instance, go to your Administration panel (you will need administrator privileges to do this). Click the “Integrate” tab, then find the AdWords Connect tab:
To manage your AdWords campaigns, you first have to connect the campaign to Piwik PRO. First, click on the “Accounts Connected” tab where you can add a new AdWords account.
Now this is important: make sure that you’re logged into the right Google account before linking the AdWords campaign in Piwik PRO! Fill in your AdWords customer id, answer some questions in the wizard, and you’re connected. It is necessary to log into Piwik PRO during the wizard so keep your Piwik PRO login credentials close.
Now all available campaigns are shown under the Campaigns Management tab. To receive AdWords data, choose the destination website and enter a corresponding Piwik campaign name for every AdWords campaign. When done, you can fetch historical campaign data from AdWords and you’re all set up!
Maximize Your Adwords Campaign ROI by Tracking Costs per Keyword
Now that you’re good to go, let’s answer this critical question: How can you maximize your Adword campaign ROI? A quick win can be found by strategically removing and adding keywords. But you want to know which keywords result in conversions. In addition, you want to know how much money you’ve spent on that keyword-specific conversion. If a certain keyword results in a conversion, but you’ve spent a lot of money on it and the revenue doesn’t cover the costs, it’s still not a profitable keyword to use.
By looking at the (historical) data that we’ve collected in Piwik PRO, we can view a lot of information about each AdWords campaign. In the Piwik PRO dashboard you can view your AdWords campaigns under “Referrers->AdWords”.
By looking at the overview you can see a clear list of keywords with corresponding figures. Let’s take a look at an example:
In this demo we can see a keyword that is generating a nice conversion rate. But it’s also giving us ROI of more than 11%. That’s a great number. So this keyword generates both revenue good ROI – that’s a keeper!
The second keyword is a variation on the coffee table. Let’s pretend that it’s a square one:
Now something interesting is happening. I am exaggerating a bit for demonstration purposes, but what we see here is a keyword that has a lot of clicks, high costs, and a small number of conversions. However, it still generates reasonable revenue.
If we didn’t have the AdWords integration we could decide to keep using the keyword since it creates this revenue. But look at the ROI. It’s negative 20%. Remember: we shouldn’t pay as much attention to revenue as we should to profit.
The basic calculation of your return on investment should be as following:
The actual profit is way too low for the marketing investment that has been made. We haven’t even considered the procurement costs of the table. So this is definitely not a keeper.
Of course, these numbers are highly exaggerated, but it becomes more complex if the numbers are not so extreme. You always want to have a positive ROI index for every keyword.
Final Thoughts
Reviewing your keywords on a regular basis is just one of the many techniques you should employ to minimize advertising costs and maximize your campaign ROI. With the new AdWords integration, Piwik PRO makes this task very simple. By taking this step, Piwik PRO has become an even more interesting tool for marketing professionals, and has grown into a truly viable alternative to Google Analytics. Right now you can have the best of both worlds: complete data ownership, compliance with EU legislation regarding data privacy, AND the strength of Google AdWords.
Jan-Willem Ligtelijn is a technical marketing specialist at Sir Miles B.V. based in the Netherlands. Sir Miles is a consultancy firm, specialized in web statistics interpretation, Piwik integrations and MarCom consultancy.
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