Google Ads - An Introduction

Dear Learners,

Welcome back to my blog. In the previous posts, I have shown you various ways of driving visibility on Search engines by making your website "Search Friendly". Which is popularly referred to as SEO. However, as marketing landscape keeps changing, it’s important to keep optimizing and finding opportunities to show your brand when your prospects are actually searching for your product or service.

Google is a competitive space and it might take a while before your page’s start ranking for your desired keywords. Successful marketers know and relate to this fact, which is why they include Paid Search platforms as a channel to enhance visibility & eventually drive traffic that converts on your website. This essentially means that you now have opportunities to showcase your products & services right in the top search results on a mobile or a desktop device in the form of Ads!

Introduction to Google Ads

Google Ads is a platform that allows website owners or businesses of all shapes & sizes to advertise their content and products or services to people who are actively looking for them on the Google's Network. These ads are an extension to your brand content on the web which allow users to identify you and engage with you. Google allows great amount of flexibility to the advertiser to decide how their ads might look through this platform. 

What are Google Networks?

Google allows advertisers to advertise on Google's 3 major networks.

• Search Network
• Display Network
• Video Network

Let's get a bit more clarity. 

Google Search Network

As per Google, the Search Network consists of the Google Search engine, this includes all country-specific TLDs (Top-Level Domains) like google.co.in, google.co.uk, google.co.au, etc. The search network also includes Google's partner Search engines like Aol.com, duckduckgo.com, rediff.com, etc. You typically advertise on this network when you want to target your ads to people while they are actively searching for your content, products, or service. Your ads on this network might look a bit like the ones showcased below...

Google Display Network

There are millions of websites, blogs & single HTML pages on the internet. A lot of these websites wish to make some extra money by displaying ads on their pages. Google offers website owners to do just that with the help of its publisher platform called Google Ad-sense. According to World Wide Web Size Google has indexed more than 4.5 Billion pages on the internet (That’s more than the number of websites!) This is Index of pages is Google's Display network. You typically advertise on this network when you want to target your audience while they are actively engaging with the content related to your product or service. Your Ads on Google's Display network might look like the ones showcased below...

Google's Video Network

While the content on websites is growing at a great pace, video content is taking center stage & grabbing attention for the brands. At the center of video content platforms are YouTube. YouTube is also considered to be the second-largest search engine in the world. And it goes without saying that advertising on YouTube is just as important for brands as it is on Google's Search Network. 99.9% of Google's Video Network consists of YouTube. You typically advertise on YouTube, when you want to target your users while they are watching a video related to your business on YouTube or YouTube partner sites or YouTube, embeds on someone else's websites. Your ads on YouTube might look like the ones showcased below.

We hope this post helped you understand the Google Ads eco-system a little better. You can write to me with your thoughts, doubts, or suggestions in the comments section. We will be back with our next post on how to create a Google Ads account & if you have already created one, how to sign in to an existing Google Ads account! Have a great day ahead & keep learning

Cheers,

Mitul Shingadia

Google Analytics - Setting Goals for your website

Hi Learners,

In our previous posts, we focussed on how to work around the Google Analytics account structure to suite your business needs, then we went through the steps of creating views & filters for your website. The next important setup for you as a marketer is setting up "Goals" on Google Analytics.

What are "Goals" in Google Analytics?

If you want visitors on your website to take certain important actions, like fill up a form, subscribe to a newsletter or interact with your Live Chat App on the website, you definitely want a way to keep track on how many visitors actually ended up meeting your website Goals. By setting up Google Analytics Goals, you are doing just that.

Steps to Setup Goals on Google Analytics

Step 1 - Visit Admin section on your GA dashboard and select the property.
Step 2 - From the View drop-down, choose the view you want to set the Goal for. Then click on Goals under that view.

Step 3 - Click on the Red button that says "+New Goal"

Step 4- Identify your Goal type (Revenue, Acquisition, Enquiry, Engagement) Analytics provides many options as templates under these headers. You can also choose to set up a "custom" Goal option to setup your own Goal. (In this case we want to see how many visitors spend more than 2 mins on our website.

Step 5 - Click on "continue" and give your goal a name (something that defines the nature of your Goal. For this goals its "2 mins +", Choose the Goal type from the list, in this case "duration" and hit continue.

Step 6 - Fill the goal details from the assigned toggle boxes to set the duration as 2 mins
Step 7 - Verify the Goal (Google gives you an estimate of goal performance, based on your past data.
Step 8 - Click on Save and Finish.

Goals are the cornerstone of data that you see on your website. You can create upto 20 Goals for every view in Google Analytics.

Hope the above steps were easy for you to follow. Do leave your comments and opinions on this blog. In our next blog we will learn about setting Audience segments that will help you understand your site audience better.

Happy learning.

Mitul

Google Analytics - Understanding Account structure, Views and Permissions

Hello Learners,

Welcome back to my blog. In my previous blogs, i shared ways to link your website to Google analytics. As we know, that most forward looking companies of our times rely on effective data to make sound business decisions. Decisions that are backed with numbers have proven to be far better and beneficial to a business, that decisions that were taken due to a hunch, or just a judgement call. Thats where Google Analytics & Digital Analytics chip in. In order to make an accurate decision for your online business, its important to set-up your tracking infrastructure in the right way. Lets rally through the account structure Google Analytics allows businesses on its platform to track data effectively.

Google Analytics Account structure

The above chart indicates the structure Google Analytics implies. To simply understand, all Google Analytics accounts can be grouped under "Organization"(Optional), this allows you to manage multiple analytics "Account" under one grouping. When you create an account, you also automatically create a "Property". A property is your website / mobile site / app. Within each property, a "View" is created for that account. A view is a set of data that you want to see pertaining to the said property. Each "Account" can have multiple "Properties", and each Property can have multiple "Views"

Weather you are an agency with multiple client accounts or a small business with a single website, this structure works with you to suit your business needs. Each analytics property is able to independently collect data with the help of a unique Analytics "Property ID"

Understanding "Views" in Google Analytics

To determine what data you want Google Analytics to collect within a specified view, you can use a feature called "Filters" within the "View settings" of your dashboard configuration.

In case of the above example, if Buyfromdharavi.com, which sells products across multiple geographical areas and multiple categories. They could create

• One view with All website data covering all regions
• Separate views for each different region (Mumbai, Pune, Nashik, etc)
• View to ignore traffic coming from internal company IP address (using IP filter)

Its a good idea to keep a default view which collects "All website data" and create custom views which allows you to create segmented data based on your business needs. Be careful while setting up views for your property because you cant change data once its captured and processed by Google Analytics.

A few things to remember

1. Views will not include past data. It will show data from the day the view was created.
2. Only admins can recover views that were deleted. (Generally within 35 days) 

Setting up "Views" in Google Analytics

Step 1 - Log in to your Analytics dashboard
Step 2 - Click on the Admin wheel and define the property from the drop-down
Step 3 - Under Views, select "Create New View"

Step 4 - Add View name & details & click "Create View"
Step 5 - Change country & Currency setting & click "Save"
Step 6 - Add Filters & Goals to Customise Views

Understanding "Permissions" in Google Analytics

You can assign permissions to other users at...

• Account level
• Property level
• View level

Each level inherits permissions from the level above it. Which means, if you have access to View level, you wont have access to modify the property or account associated with that view.

There are 4 types of user permissions

1. Manage - that allows you to add/remove users
2. Edit - That allows users to Edit configuration settings in Google Analytics
3. Collaborate - That allows you to add users to view / share data with
4. Read & Analyse - A version on "Read Only" data

To assign permissions...

Step 1 - Log in to your GA dashboard. Click on the Admin wheel on the left of your screen
Step 2 - Under Property, pick the property under consideration
Step 3 - Click on User management



Step 4 - Click on "+" sign
Step 5 - Add email ID
Step 6 - Select permission level
Step 7 - Add

Hope the above steps were easy to implement. Do feel free to write back in the comments section to address any doubts you might have.

Hope to hear from you soon. Have a great festive season.

Cheers,

Mitul