Who needs this Google Analytics dashboard?

• Online store owners who run AdWords campaigns and use their own brand/product names as trigger words

Requirements

• Google Analytics must be installed, including e-commerce tracking
• The Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts must be linked
• You need to manually insert your own brand names after downloading the dashboard

How can this dashboard help you?

Averages lie! – Averages and aggregated figures don’t tell you the full truth. This dashboard will help you assess the performance of the AdWords campaigns and keywords that are not directly related to your brand. This is truely crucial information if you a want to know the real story about your AdWords returns.

By downloading and saving this dashboard to your own Google Analytics profile you will get the following insights:

• AdWords totals for visits, ad spend and revenue
• AdWords visits, ad spend and revenue which can be attributed to your brand keywords
• AdWords visits, ad spend and revenue from generic keywords

+ Save dashboard to your Google Analytics profile

Contents of dashboard

• Remember to enter your brand in the widget settings

This dashboard only makes sense if Google know your brand name(s). Follow below steps.

1. Click on the “Gear” icon on each of the 8 widgets in the middle and right columns of the dashboard.
2. Type your brand name into the field marked with a red circle below (add additional rows if your customers know you by several different names)
3. Click “save”

Now Google will be able to split your statistics into branded and non-branded keywords.

Things to consider

• Don’t trust averages

Aggregated figures can be very deceptive.

If you include your own brand and product names as trigger keywords in your AdWords ad groups (and you should include them…), then you risk that a typically very high return on investment on your brand campaigns hides poorly performing generic keyword campaigns.

For this reason you need to look at this dashboard and evaluate the performance of branded and non-branded campaigns separately.

• Are your brand campaigns not selling?

Generally speaking your brand campaigns should always perform well. People know you upfront and are actively looking for your store, which is nearly always bound to give you high conversion rates.

However, if your metrics on the right side of the dashboard (the column with the “brand” widgets) are only average, then you really need to investigate why.

• Is your brand name generic?

If your brand name is partly generic (eg. www.alphashoes.com) or fully generic (eg. www.cheapshoes.com), then you will have a hard time distinguishing between visitors who already know your brand and visitors who are just out shopping for shoes. You can’t really fix this, so just be aware of the fact that some people will likely see and click on your brand ad although they didn’t know you upfront.

• Always use same currency for income and expenses

Make sure that you compare apples to apples by using the same currency for both your AdWords account and your Analytics e-commerce tracking.

If you don’t, then you will have a hard time making sense of your stats.

+ Save dashboard to your Google Analytics profile