Google Analytics is one of the best free analytics tool that is available to track traffic and other activities on your website. This analytics tool is an awesome free product from Google and majority of the website owners use Google Analytics on their website to analyze the overall site traffic. A webmaster who is serious about his website’s performance always log into his analytics account multiple times a day.
Such is the amazing stats offered by this web analytics tool that is has become an integral part of any website. Especially for those websites which focuses mainly on generating income through their website or indulges in other ways of making money online, Google Analytics is a mandatory thing to make sure that things are going as per the marketing plans.
A major feature of Google Analytics that it helps us to integrate it with Google’s advertising platforms such as Adwords and Adsense. Usually with a Google Analytics account that has been integrated with an Adwords account, you will be able to see a term “content targeting” along with the list of keywords under the “Overview” section of the “Traffic Sources”. This “content targeting” phrase will be seen along with the whole list of keywords that brings traffic to the website, either through organic or paid methods.
For those who are new to Adwords, this term might sound confusing and they will not be able to distinguish it from the other keywords in the list. Actually the “content targeting” refers to the number of clicks generated from “content network” of Google Adwords program. The “content network” of Adwords program usually consists of websites that take part in Google Adsense program, which is another major contextual advertising platform offered by Google.
In Google Adsense program, advertisement codes are placed on websites and the website will start showing advertisements based on the keywords present in the content of the website. So the ads will change randomly and will show ads for different website. So click coming from such advertisements are usually shown in the “content targeting” section of Google Analtyics and you can see this result only if you have integrated Google Analytics with you Adwords account.
If you drill down more into the “content targeting” section, you can see which Adwords Ad Group or Ad has triggered the click, which will help you to analyze your Adwords account in a much better way. This will help you in a better understanding the progress of the different ways of making money strategies that you have implemented through your website. You will be able to know which ads or which keywords are bringing you more clicks and which keywords are performing poorly in your adwords account. Either you are running an online ecommerce store, informative sites, corporate site, online business opportunities for sale, online director etc., you cannot think of a website that is minus an analytics software and its amazing feature. The “Content Targeting” report is really a vital report if you have linked your Adwords and Analytics account.
Content targeting often creates lots of confusion. When i was an SEO newbie and was tasked to setup and managed our adword campaign, my managers would always ask me to explain content targeting in details every meeting. Even our supposed marketing manager has no idea how the hell we generated tons of traffic from this source.
Always nice to have simple refresher like this that can easily share to my new boss. lol. Thanks!