Google Ads & Analytics: How They Work Together

When it comes to Google Ads, the limits of the technology are hard to grasp. In fact, even what we see as marketers, enthusiasts and Saskatoon SEO experts may not be the whole picture. As GrowME Marketing will illustrate today, one of the greatest benefits of the pay-per-click advertising platform is the huge amount of data readily available for research.

See, the thing about Google Ads is that it isn’t all that different from SEO in Saskatoon. Indeed, they both look like simple content marketing and traditional advertising methods. However, where they differ from newspaper or billboard ads is that they track every single person who sees them and the main method of improving their conversion rate or other metric is through technical, not creative, means.

To illustrate this point a bit better, let’s go through a typical ad cycle. We build the ads, set up the campaigns and adgroups, and determine the budgets for each. Then, we let them loose to gather data. When we come back later, we see a clear trend for our ads to show to users in Saskatoon, who also tend to click them.

As a result, we geo-target this location, and up the SEO in Saskatoon efforts we’ve been doing. Again, the ads are left to run for a period and gather more data. The next time we check on them, we see that there are particular neighbourhoods that interact with the ads, but also that their bounce rate (the period after users navigate to the site before leaving) has begun to increase. Digging into the data, we see that our ads are getting crossed with a competitor’s, which we soon add to our negative keyword list.

Once again, the ads are left to run and, once again, we check back, find issues in the data and make subtle adjustments. Over time, we have a super-powerful advertising campaign that directly targets the best leads and reduces the overall cost of any individual adgroup. This is the true power of Google Ads, and the data-driven mindset advertisers are quickly adopting.

Just to hearken back to the sentiment expressed earlier, we have no idea how complex or detailed the raw data is. After all, what we see as users of the advertising platform is just a small, unknown and unconfirmed subset of the sum total of the information collected by Google on all its users. Even if we consider how our information is limited by our geographic location, we can see how more digital-unfriendly nations are likely getting less information than their more unregulated counterparts.

All this means is that the information is probably vaster than we imagine and will eventually be rolled out and tested, and compared against other methods to create an even more powerful platform. The results of such an exercise are hard to predict, but judging by the rapid and multi-stage growth of these large tech companies, we can expect that it will have explosive results.