Identifying if your Google ads are showing and for what keywords the advert is being displayed, is an important part of knowing that you are getting value for money from a Google PPC advertising campaign. There are tools and tracking statistics that Google provides to help you identify how often adverts are showing, where they are showing and how effective they are when they are shown.

3 Google ways to see advert data are
• Campaign statistics
• Ads Diagnostic Tool
• Analytics

Campaign Stats
A Google campaign can be tracked for effectiveness through the statistics that are accessed when looking at each campaign that is set up. The important metric in knowing if adverts are being shown is the ‘Impressions’. Impressions are the number of times your advert has been displayed over the date range set.

The date range can be set using the date range tool

To get a good idea of what is happening have a look at your campaign settings over a week and then a month and then three months.

Looking down the column for Impr which relates to impressions it can be seen that for each of the adgroups a certain amount of Impressions have occurred. If the Imperssion number starts dropping over time (change date range) then it can be stated that the number of times adverts are being displayed are decreasing.

Ad Diagnostic Tool

This tool gives the ability test if Google believes that there are adverts in the campaign that are relevant for a particular keyword. If Google finds an advert in the campaign it will display it here as follows.

Having Google identify a relevant advert does not mean that adverts in the campaign are being displayed as regularly as is intended. All it does is identify if Google believes that there is a relevant advert for that keyword. If there is no relevant advert for that keyword then this is the first area to address and create an advert that targets the keyword that is being aimed at.

Analytics
This tool is a separate tool provided by Google. It is free to sign up for, all that is needed is an Google account. Once signed up for an Analytic account with Google a piece of tracking code will be supplied. Place this tracking code at the bottom of each page that needs to be tracked. Some time will need to pass for statistics to be gathered, but there is a feature that helps identify how many times an advert is displayed for a certain keyword in a given advertising spot.

After logging in and under the tab ‘Traffic Sources’ and then ‘Adwords’ and then ‘Keyword Positions’ Google will be able to tell what positions adverts appeared in. Google don’t distinguish between which adverts as there will normally be a number of adverts attached to any one campaign. This information can be tracked through the campaign summary and looking at the ad variation tab.

From all of these sources of information it can be reasonably worked out if campaigns adverts are being displayed effectively. This will help in deciding how to better fine tune a Google adwords campaign, and it may be by improve the landing pages or by targeting keywords better by increasing the number of search terms or improving the content of the advert and of coarse the bit that Google likes, increasing the cost per click.

Keywords are essential to optimizing a website. Knowing who has the market share of those keywords, or in other words who is getting the traffic for those keywords is important information. With this information the competition can be analysed and a webmaster starts to get an idea of what they need to do in order to get traffic from that keyword.

There are a number of tools that can help in identifying what sites are getting the majority of traffic for a search term. I have taken the search term “Hobart” and looked at the competition through Hitwise. Below is the chart of who is getting the most traffic from this search local term.

Google offer a number tools and services that can help in getting your website recognized in Googles search results. These tools all come free of charge except for Googles Pay-per-click program which they call adwords.

This year, if you are planning to start marketing your business “on line” it is a good idea to start out using the tools that Google have provided. I have made a list of six services that I believe are vital as a first step in promoting a website on the internet.

1. Register a Google account – None of the services that Google offer can be accessed with out creating a Google account. This can be as simple as using one of Googles services, which range from Gmail, iGoogle or any other service that they offer.

2. Register for Google webmaster tools – This tool requires you telling Google that you own a particular website. Google verify this claim by asking you to place a file on your site or some code into your home page. Once this is complete Google provide a lot of hidden information about how they read your website, they also are able to give suggestions of how you can improve your Google rankings.

3. Register for Googles Local search – Local search is when Google have verified that your business is relevant for a specific geographical region. They do this by asking website owners to claim their website and confirm their address. Google will do this confirmation by telephone or letter. Once this is done a business will show up in a search results map if someone searches in your geographical area and uses your keywords. It is a relatively easy way to quickly get to the top of local search result queries.

4. Register for Google analytics – This allows a website owner to track the traffic to a website with a high end sophisticated web tracking tool. The interface is easy to use and the amount of information available is quite enormous.

5. Start a Google adwords campaign – This is Pay-per-click (PPC) and will allow you to have your website appear at the top of search listings for specific targeted keywords. You only pay for the visitor that clicks on your advert and it is probably one of the most cost effective and fastest ways of getting instant traffic.

6. Use the Google RSS reader – This wont drive traffic to your site but is a fantastic way to organize all the information that comes flooding into your email inbox. What happens is you subscribe to a website whose information is interesting using your Google reader, you then unsubscribe from the mail list. This saves your mail box and allows you easy access to view information in a well organized way, with out spam.

The new ga.js tracking code from google promises to allow access to better tracking functionality. This includes e-commerce in a more readable way.

When accessing your analytic account under Website Profiles select the edit function under settings. At the top of the page in the top right hand corner is a link called (Check Status). Select this and the page with the latest ga.js Tracking Code for Google analytics shows up.

Copy this code and replace your old code with the new one. There is a warning not to place both analytic code snippets on your pages at the same time as this will lead to bad tracking results.