by Jeff Martin

There isn’t anything sexy or exciting about looking closely over your campaigns. However, doing so through web analytics can save you not only time and money but can also lead to increased revenues through your paid search campaigns.

It’s no secret the search engines stockpile data concerning anything you do. You can’t perform searches without them knowing what you searched for (of course) what results or ads you clicked on, how long you stayed at a site and then went back to the results and choose another, how many results pages you combed through, where you are located, etc. Their data is broken down day-by-day, click-by-click.

Yet, for PPC advertisers, despite paying to have visits to their sites, advertisers are not allowed to know the particulars of each user who clicks their ads through any reporting from the search engines. The search engines have been consistently under pressure to share the information you have. Google has said that they desire to be more transparent and more sharing in the future, but time will tell. Because this click-by-click visitor and usage information is not made available, it’s important to review your web analytics closely and frequently.

Web analytics can save you time by:

• Viewing all user activity and their relevant information, for all PPC networks in one console (in real-time)
• Running custom reports to filter down to specific variables you want to use or data you only want to see, getting rid of the “noise”
• Helping spot suspicious activity through customized and automated reports rather than combing through raw data to see if suspicious activity exists

Web analytics can cut costs and save you money by:

• Ensuring that your ads are only showing for geographic regions you have specified
• Ensuring that your phrase / exact matching settings are being observed
• Ensuring that ads are not showing for negative keywords you have specified
• Ensuring that your ads are not running outside of ad scheduling hours
• Helping you monitor campaigns for suspicious activity and aiding you in seeking credits

Web analytics can help increase revenues by:

• Finding new negative keywords to use based on all of the queries that generated clicks
• Finding new niche and tail keywords to advertise on based on all of the queries that generated clicks

Web analytics allow marketers to spend more time marketing and business owners to spend more time running their business rather than pouring through data.