Google Ads

Google Ads beyond the ads dashboard

The Google Ads dashboard shows impressions, clicks and cost. But the question that matters is a different one: what did those people do after they reached the site? The articles in this category help you connect ad spend to real visitor behavior and to the results that matter for the business.

We explain how to make sure visits from ads are identified correctly in analytics tools, how to compare campaigns with each other and how to keep paid traffic from being mixed up with organic or direct.

What you'll learn

• How to check that auto-tagging is working on your ads.
• Which indicators to watch on the website, beyond the numbers in Google Ads itself.
• How to compare campaign performance across equivalent periods.
• Why logging every change to budget, keywords or ads helps explain shifts in traffic.

Who it's for

For anyone managing paid campaigns, in-house or for clients, who needs to justify spend with website data and not only click metrics. It's also useful for business owners who hire an agency and want to understand the reports they receive.

Before you touch the campaign

Every change to a campaign changes the traffic reaching the site. If you switch the audience, the bid or the ad copy and don't note when you did it, it becomes very hard to explain later why visits went up or down. Keep a short record of each change, with the date and the reason.

In WEBPilot, every website has a dated history of the actions taken, so campaign changes sit right next to how traffic evolves. Learn more about traffic analytics.