Google has recently updated Adwords to incorporate a lot more data from Google Analytics. You can now synch your accounts so that you can pull bounce rate, average visit duration, and pages per visit into the Adwords interface. This allows you to quickly view valuable data at a glance in Adwords instead of digging around in Google Analytics to find the insights you need to make informed decisions with your account.
This change is one of my favorite updates to Adwords in a long time. The aspect I am excited about is the ability to view bounce rate by ad. While you have been able to use an ads headline or destination url to get this information in Google Analytics in for some time, you weren’t able to check by the description lines. With this data you will be able to make more informed decision when testing your ads, and finding which send the most qualified traffic to your site.
The data will be incorporated into most sections of your Adwords account; however there are a few notable exceptions that don’t use the data. The biggest is the display network tab. As of the writing of this post, you can’t pull in the new analytics data for this tab, which is unfortunate as it would make analyzing your display keywords and placements much easier. The second area that doesn’t incorporate the new data is the matched search queries. It’s important to note that while you cannot get the bounce rate and visit duration in Adwords for these two areas, you can still get most of the data in Google Analytics, and can organize them to follow your campaign structure using custom reports.
Follow the steps below to synch your accounts.
1. Sign into your Adwords account at //adwords.google.com
2. In the “My account” drop down, click the “Linked Accounts” option.
3. Select the Google Analytics profiles you want to import data from.
a. You can select up to ten profiles
4. Once you have selected the profiles, click add to the right of the profile name.
5. Once they are linked, it can take several hours for data to pull over. Although I usually saw data populate in a couple of minutes.
For more information on this change to Adwords, and for more detailed step by step instructions on synching you accounts click here.