Dashboard 12 – AdWords Brand vs Non-Brand
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:
+ Save dashboard to your Google Analytics profile
Contents of dashboard
This widgets shows the total number of visits that can be attributed to your AdWords campaigns.
The tiny greyed out percentage below the large figure shows how this compares to the total amount of visits. In this case AdWords generated ~43% af all visits.
This is the amount of money you paid Google for running your AdWords campaigns.
If this figure is zero, you probably forgot to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts.
This widgets show the total revenue brought in by AdWords.
The figure usually includes taxes and shipping charges.
This widget shows how many people that searched for a generic word (or phrase) before clicking on your AdWords ad.
“Shoes” is a generic word. “Zappos” is not.
This widget shows how much you paid Google for visits from people who clicked your AdWords ad after typing a generic word in the Google search field.
This is your gross revenue (usually including taxes and shipping) from AdWords customers who used generic terms when searching for your products.
This tables shows you the 10 generic keywords that attracted most visits from your paid Google ads.
The revenue shown in the third column is Gross Revenue.
This widget shows how many people that searched for your brand name before clicking on your AdWords ad.
NB: If the figure is zero, then you probably either didn’t use your own brand as trigger keyword in your AdWords campaigns or you simply haven’t set up the widgets yet.
This widget shows how much you paid Google for visits from people who clicked your AdWords ad after typing a your brand name word in the Google search field.
This is your gross revenue (usually including taxes and shipping) from AdWords customers who used your own brand name as search term when searching for you.
This tables shows you the 10 brand related keywords that attracted most visits from your paid Google ads.
The revenue shown in the third column is Gross Revenue.
This dashboard only makes sense if Google know your brand name(s). Follow below steps.
- Click on the “Gear” icon on each of the 8 widgets in the middle and right columns of the dashboard.
- 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)
- Click “save”
Now Google will be able to split your statistics into branded and non-branded keywords.
Things to consider
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.
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.
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.
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
We’re tracking Tweets and Google plusses of this dashboard to determine whether you want more dashboards within this category.
If you like it, then show it 
This Google Analytics dashboard has been designed by Jacob Kildebogaard, a Danish Google Analytics wizard.
Get notified about new dashboards!
Comments are closed