Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Here is the issue:
G analytics gives me: 1) A list of transactions from my cart 2) the revenue that each kw generates.
G analytics doesn't give me: 1)KW revenue broken down by match type
and - most importantly.....
It wont link a KW click to a specific transaction.
Why is this so important? Well, my most profitable term generates a lot of revenue, but I have NO WAY of determining how much money I made, simply because different products have different margins:
A) During the previous week, Click on ad for widgets generates a sale of widget one:
My price on W1 is 100.00, less cost of goods sold 50.00 = GM of 50.00, less click costs for the period of 27.00 = 23.00 profit. Yay! In this scenario I can't buy enough clicks to suit me.
B) During the previous week, Click on ad for widgets generates a sale of widget TWO:
My price on W2 is 100.00, less cost of goods sold 70.00 = GM of 30.00, less click costs for the period of 37.00 = -7.00 loss! In this scenario, I need to change something pronto.
But the way analytics is set up, both of these scenarios are clumped together. I can only see revenue, or a list of transactions. I can't separate out the click to sale data, so I have no way of knowing if a KW is really profitable or not!
My current spend is well over 5k/month on GAW, and margins on products sold vary from 34.00 to well over 1000.00 Yes that's right. Over 1000 margin - you can see why it is vital to know if a sale is from GAW or organic results. 5 or 6 good orders can pay for GAW for the month!
I am running a Yahoo store, and Yahoo does give me data on revenue per KW, but again, no way to know if a sale is from KW via organic or GAW, or another PPC source. Very frustrating.
What I have been doing is simply taking all my traffic data, and all my sales data, and extrapolating from that, i.e. if 50% of my traffic on a given KW is from GAW, 50% of my sales are as well. Of course, this assumes that traffic from an ad click converts at the same rate as other traffic. I think that is a huge assumption. It also assumes that clicks on an ad generate sales that have an average gross margin. It really is way too sloppy for me to base so much ad spend on.
If anyone can give me any guidance or recommend an analytic package that will give me what I need, I would buy it in a flash. The really frustrating thing is that the data is there - just not presented.
You'd want a nested custom report - top level would be "keyword and match type" and the 2nd level would be "product SKU" or whatever. You could also have the top level be just "keyword paid for" or perhaps even "keyword actually used." The columns would then be # units. Reporting on revenue would be easy to add though not necessary --- with just the SKU in the report you can export to Excel and use a lookup table to add the revenue and profit information.)
To capture the needed raw data you'd have to change the way you set up your AdWords, resulting in both kw and matchtype being in tracking parameters in the destination URLs. (Google Analytics uses the gibberish "gclid" tracking parameter generated by AdWords, and only GA can decipher it into kw etc. You'll have to rework your destination URLs in AdWords but if you submit your ads via spreadsheet it's easy to set this up. Yahoo has always been far more helpful; it generates tracking parameters that are not encoded at all.)
If you are spending $5K per month on AdWords then the expense of a paid analytics solution might pay for itself pretty quickly.
