Google AdWords: Attribution Modeling & Search Funnel Reports [Video]
Advertisers using Google AdWords often find attribution modeling and search funnel reports a complicated subject. In the video below, our own Lewis Brannon* breaks down attribution modeling and search funnel reports to show users how to enhance their AdWords campaign performance and improve the bottom line.
*Lewis will be presenting on How to Assess and Adjust AdWords Strategy for 2015 on our webinar December 10th
How to Use Attribution Modeling & Search Funnels
Video Transcript
Lewis: Hey everyone. My name is Lewis and I’m a retail search manager here at CPC Strategy, and today, I’m going to be talking about attribution modeling and search funnels. I know that attribution modeling as a subject is something that can be extremely complex and a little bit scary for a lot of guys out there in the advertising space.
What I’m going to try to do is show you some more simple ways to look at attribution modeling and search funnels within AdWords specifically that can really kind of take a lot of that chaos out of it and can give us some good insight into our portfolio performance overall. There are two main things that we talk about when we’re talking about search funnels or attribution modeling.
Assisted Metrics
Those are the assisted metrics and the search funnels reports. The assisted metrics refers to impression assisted conversions and click assisted conversions. Those are metrics we can add within our column views at a keyword level or a campaign or ad group level that can give us insight into assists that are happening along the path of a conversion.
Search Funnel Reports
The second thing is the search funnel reports. In retail search, we talk about dominating the bottom of the funnel, meaning that those types of searches that are product based and really specific, we definitely want to be there, we want to dominate that traffic, and we want to convert it. But a lot of times, that traffic is very limited, so what do we have to do? We have to go up the funnel a little bit. We have to start going after some of that more broad, more topical type of search traffic.
In that case, when we do that, we’re going to be spending a lot more money. It becomes that much more important to trace that spend and see what kind of impact it’s having. A lot of times, those campaigns and those ads can be considered losing campaigns, but that’s not always the case. How do we find that out? The AdWords search funnel reports give us insight into those multiple touch points that can happen on the search path. We access that through the conversions tab. In the conversions tab, you can go to funnel reports, and there you’re going to see at an ad group, a campaign, a keyword level, and even a search query level you can see those top paths that are leading to conversions.
A lot of times,what ends up happening in search marketing is that we have campaigns that are more general, more top of the funnel, and we’re not really seeing those conversion numbers come in on those keywords and those ads. We have the tendency to say okay, these are losing campaigns or this is a losing ad. But what we can really glean from the search funnel reports is we can look at those paths and say okay, maybe this keyword is not giving us a lot of last click conversions, but it’s acquiring a lot of traffic for us that’s later converting through maybe a trademark term or maybe a more specific product term. This is really great insight that we can get from these types of reports, and they’re often overlooked.
Here at CPC Strategy, we really try to integrate that into our strategy and into our analysis of the campaigns, and it can be really, really helpful in getting an overall understanding of exactly how our ad spend portfolio is performing. Obviously, with a better strategy comes better profit, and that’s the bottom line.
Hopefully, you guys can start taking advantage of those reports, you can get some really good insight from them, and it’ll lead to a better strategy and more profit. Good luck. Thanks for watching.
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