To understand the impact of your Google Ads campaigns, you need a deep understanding of Google Ads analytics. Fortunately, Google provides a suite of free tools that offer marketers a variety of ways to report on their paid campaigns. Armed with robust analytics, marketers can make data-driven decisions that can drive significant optimizations.
Here are 4 free tools to consider to measure Google Ads analytics:
1. Google Analytics
Let’s start with the basics. Google Analytics is one the most powerful digital marketing platforms out there. But one of the major limiting factors to Google Analytics is that by default, it only tracks information regarding your website. Google Analytics shines in measuring key metrics like where your traffic is coming from, traffic demographics, and traffic behavior.
Fortunately, it’s easy to link Google Analytics with Google Ads. Using Google Analytics to view Google Ads analytics can reveal how important KPIs–like keywords, search queries, display targeting, and more–impact your website traffic. It can also power up a multi-channel funnel report, which shows how customers are interacting with your brand across the internet. For example, a prospect may have been brought into a blog post through a display ad, but might only reengage with the brand weeks later through a paid search ad.
Understanding these touch points help you optimize which channels to emphasize in the customer journey. If you’re finding that more customers are converting after a CPC ad, you’ll know to use more of your ad budget on those ad types.
2. Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager makes it possible for marketers to build their analytics and measure google ads analytics, all without having to rebuild applications. You can add Google Tag Manager through Facebook pixels and through WordPress sites to help with all advertising tracking.
With Google Tag Manager, you can configure conversion tags that help you build reports to uncover the path a customer takes after they click on your ads. This could be about actions like purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, or even downloading different elements of your site. All these actions are referred to as “conversions”, which might differ from the conventional term you’re used to hearing.
Here’s a great article from Google Support about all the different ways you have to track these conversions with Google Ads analytics.
3. Google Search Console
The Google Search Console is a free utility provided by Google that makes it possible for you to take a look at how Google sees your site. While it is mainly focused on SEO related inquiries, Google Search Console can provide a really nice comparative set against your paid searches to see which keywords are performing best.
When you connect Google Search Console to measure Google Ads analytics, you get a great overview of paid vs. organic keywords. The best part of this comparison is that you can see where you’re performing well organically, and can reduce the bid amount for those paid search times to optimize your budget.
To create a Google Search Console linked account in Google Ads, here’s what you need to do.
- Click on Tools, and go to Linked Accounts (under Setup)
- Select “Search Console”
- Click the “Link” button in the bottom right.
- Enter your web address and click “Continue”
Now, in Google Ads, you can access the “Paid & Organic Report”. And that’s all you’ll need to start optimizing your keyword strategy.
4. Joinr
You’re probably already familiar with Joinr (since it’s plastered all over this page), but we’re excited to share it here because it can really bring a lot of value to how you report on Google Ads analytics.
Using an ad data framework, Joinr extracts data from Google Ads and cleans it up along the way, delivering essential metrics that can be easily synced and visualized with Google Data Studio.
Joinr helps you zero-in on key metrics like ROAS, conversions and more to ensure your ad budget is being utilized as effectively as possible.
