Tag Archives: content

Upcoming change to AdWords Display ad groups with no targeting options specified

Historically, ad groups in Display campaigns have not served until you added at least one positive ad group targeting criterion, such as Placement or CriterionUserList. This behavior worked well if your goal was to target specific criteria on Display, but not if your goal was to target as broad an audience as possible.

What's changing
Starting January 11, 2017, a Display ad group will be eligible to serve ads as soon as its status is set to ENABLED and it has a bid, a budget, and an approved ad. If the ad group does not have any ad group level positive targeting criteria, then the ad group will target the entire Display network, subject to exclusions and campaign-level targeting settings (such as geo, language, etc.), with the potential to quickly exhaust your campaign budget.

This change only impacts campaigns with AdvertisingChannelType of DISPLAY or VIDEO.

Before this feature is enabled on your account, any existing Display ad groups without ad group level positive targeting criteria will be set to PAUSED.

What you should do
For existing Display campaigns and ad groups:
  • If you want to target the entire Display network (subject to exclusions and campaign-level targeting settings), then after the feature is enabled, make sure you set those ad groups to ENABLED, since they will be in the PAUSED state.
  • Otherwise, add the desired positive targeting criteria to each ad group, and then set it to ENABLED.
For new Display campaigns and ad groups, review your application's ad group creation workflow to ensure that it does the following:
  • Sets the AdGroup status field to PAUSED when creating a new ad group via AdGroupService.mutate and an ADD operation.
  • Only sets the AdGroup status to ENABLED after adding targeting criteria (if desired). You can update the status of your AdGroup via AdGroupService.mutate and a SET operation.
In addition, if your application adds and removes targeting criteria from existing Display ad groups, make sure that it will also properly update the the ad group's status to PAUSED or ENABLED if the intended side-effect of criterion addition or removal is to pause or start serving. This is particularly important when removing the only positive criterion for an ad group, since this will change its reach from very narrow to very broad.

If you have any questions, please post on the forum or the Ads Developers Plus Page.
- Josh Radcliff, AdWords API Team

Introducing Content Grouping in the Behavior Flow

Many of you have shared with us that it’s difficult to identify traffic patterns from Behavior Flows that include a large number of pages. That’s why we're pleased to announce that we’re adding support for Content Groupings in the Behavior Flow. 

Content Groupings let you group pages and content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site. The Behavior Flow view provides a graphical representation of how visitors flow through your site by traffic source (or any other dimension) so you can see their journeys, as well as where they dropped off. Now, you can select Content Groupings in the Behavior Flow to see how visitors flow through Content Groupings that you have defined.  This can help you answer questions like “Where do users who read my sports pages go next? Do they view more sports articles or do they switch to another section? Or, do they simply drop off?”


The more time you spend setting up your Content Groupings, the more information you will be able to discover from viewing them in the Behavior Flow. Watch the video to learn more about setting up Content Groupings.


Visit our Help Center to learn how to get started with Content Groupings, or read this article about using the Behavior Flow once you have set up your Content Groupings.

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Matthew Anderson, Google Analytics Team

Reminder: Change to contentBid setting in “Display Network Only” campaigns

We previously announced that we are removing the ability to set contentBid for “Display Network only” campaigns in the AdWords API on February 18th, 2014. However, based on developer feedback, we are moving this date to March 3, 2014.

If your application modifies ad group bids for Display-only campaigns, then your application may be affected by this change.

To make sure your applications and scripts work properly, you should make the following changes to your application code before March 3, 2014:
  • Modify your code to set the default ad group bid instead of contentBid for “Display Only Campaigns”.
  • Clear out the contentBid field for “Display Only Campaigns” by setting it to zero so that AdWords will start using the default ad group bid when serving your ads.
  • If you store campaigns in a local data store, re-sync your data store with AdWords to pick up the updated default bid values.
If you have any questions about this change or the AdWords API in general, you can post them on our developer forum. You can also follow our Google+ page for updates about the AdWords API.

Anash P. Oommen, AdWords API Team

Reminder: Change to contentBid setting in “Display Network Only” campaigns

As previously announced, we are removing the ability to set contentBid for “Display Network only” campaigns in the AdWords API on February 18th, 2014. Once this change happens, you will start receiving a ReadOnlyError.READ_ONLY error for all versions of the API if you set contentBid for a “Display Network only” campaign. You can use the fieldPath of the ApiError object to identify the operation triggering the error.

To make sure your applications and scripts work properly, you should make the following changes to your application code before February 18th, 2014:
  • modify your code to set the default ad group bid instead of contentBid for “Display Only Campaigns”
  • clear out the contentBid field for “Display Only Campaigns” so that AdWords will start using the default ad group bid when serving your ads
  • if you store campaigns in a local data store, re-sync your data store with AdWords to pick up the updated default bid values
If you have any questions about this change or the AdWords API in general, you can post them on our developer forum. You can also follow our Google+ page for updates about the AdWords API.

Anash P. Oommen, AdWords API Team

Wrangle Your Site Categories And Product Types With Content Grouping

Viewing your site content in logical groups is important for sites and businesses of all types. It lets you understand how different categories of products are working together and the buckets that generate the most revenue. Or, if you run a news site understand which categories are the hottest and most in demand. Some of you have been analyzing these things in the past via Advanced Segments but we want to make this even easier and more useful across the product. That’s why we’re excited to launch Content Grouping.

Content Grouping allows sites to group their pages through tracking code, a UI-based rules editor, and/or UI-based extraction rules. Once implemented, Content Groupings become a dimension of the content reports and allow users to visualize their data based on each group in addition to the other primary dimensions.
We’ve been hard at work refining Content Grouping based on tester feedback to create a simplified experience that has been unified with the familiar Channel Grouping interface. Content Grouping supports three methods for creating groups: 1) Tracking Code, 2) Rules, 3) Extraction. You can use a single method or a combination of all of them. 
This will help you wrangle those long lists of tens, hundreds or thousands of URLs, most of which have a tiny portion of the pageviews (or entrances, exits, etc) each one being individually not interesting, but together telling a meaningful story. We would like to help you grasp and represent this data in a grouped format, helping you understand the overall areas that the website owner has (e.g. “product pages”, “search pages”, “watch pages”).
Content Grouping lets you group content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site. You can view aggregated metrics by group name, and then drill in to individual URLs, page titles, or screen names. For example, you can see the aggregated number of pageviews for all pages in /Men/Shirts rather than for each URL or page title, and then drill in to see statistics for individual pages.

Watch the below video to learn more:


Be sure and visit our Help Center to learn how to get started with Content Grouping today.

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Russell Ketchum, Google Analytics Team

Optimizing AdSense Revenue Using Google Analytics

Recently Google Analytics launched two important new capabilities for its AdSense integration: AdSense Exits reports and AdSense Revenue as an experiment objective. They both come as a great additions to websites that use AdSense for monetization. In this post I will go over the the AdSense Analytics integration and how it can be used to optimize AdSense revenue.

Integrating AdSense and Google Analytics

Before going further into the wonders of the Analytics AdSense marriage, you should first be sure that your accounts are linked properly. Here is how to do it. First follow the steps in the screenshot below after logging into Google Analytics (Admin => AdSense Linking => Link Accounts): 

AdSense and Analytics Integration (click for full size)

You will be sent to your AdSense account in order to confirm the linking and then you will be sent back to Google Analytics to choose which profiles should include this data. If you have any problems or additional questions, take a look at the AdSense Help Center. After the integration is complete the following metrics will be available on your Google Analytics account:
  • AdSense revenue: revenue generated by AdSense ads.
  • Ads clicked: the number of times AdSense ads were clicked.
  • AdSense CTR (click-through rate): the percentage of page impressions that resulted in a click on an ad.
  • AdSense eCPM: AdSense revenue per 1,000 page impressions.
  • AdSense ads viewed: number of ads viewed.
  • AdSense Page Impressions: the number of pageviews during which an ad was displayed.

AdSense Reports On Google Analytics

Currently, there are 3 out-of-the-box AdSense reports available on Analytics: Pages, Referrers and Exits. You can find them here (direct link to report).

1. AdSense Pages

This report provides information about which pages contributed most to AdSense revenue. It will show each of the pages on the website and how well they performed in terms of AdSense. For each page in the website that contains an AdSense unit we will be able to analyze the following metrics: AdSense revenue, AdSense ads clicked, AdSense CTR, AdSense eCPM, AdSense ads viewed and AdSense page impressions. 

This report provides an interesting view of which page performed best, and it can be used to optimize website content. For example, if you find that posts about celebrities generate more revenue than posts about soccer, you might consider writing more about celebrities (if your main objective is to make money on AdSense.)

2. AdSense Referrers

This report provides information about the performance of domains that referred visitors who generated AdSense revenue. This information is extremely valuable; however, I suggest using a different report, since it provides more in-depth information: “All Traffic”. 

The AdSense Referrers only displays information about websites that generated AdSense Revenue, it does not provide information on other types of traffic sources and campaigns. For this reason, I believe the All Traffic report presents a more complete view. To find the report, go to this page (direct link to report) and click on the AdSense tab just above the chart.

3. AdSense Exits

AdSense Exit report shows the number of sessions that ended due to a user clicking on an AdSense ad. This is an interesting metric as it can show which pages have a "high conversion rate", i.e. the ratio of visits to a page and those that left the website clicking on an AdSense unit through it. If your monetization is made through AdSense this report will give just that: AdSense conversion rate per page.

Optimizing AdSense revenue using Google Analytics

Below is an example of how to use the integration from my Analytics for Publishers eBook. Most websites work with templates and each template may have different AdSense placements; this means that an important analysis would be to compare performance by template (or by category) rather than by page. 

In order to analyze template performance, we will need to create one segment per template. If you want to learn more about creating Segments, check this Help Center article. For example, let’s suppose your website has the following page templates:
  • Analytics pages with URLs structured as example.com/analytics/...
  • Testing pages with URLs structured as example.com/testing/...
  • Targeting pages with URLs structured as example.com/targeting/...
In this case you would create three segments using the dimension Page, each containing its unique pattern: /analytics/ for analytics pages, /testing/ for testing pages, and /targeting/ for targeting pages. Below is an example of how the segment would look for the analytics pages: 

Analyzing template performance using segments (click for full size) 

After creating the segments for all three templates, you will be able to choose all of them in the top-left corner of the screen (just above the chart, see bubble #1 above) to see a comparison between them. Below is a screenshot showing how such a comparison would look like: 

Table comparison metrics for different visitor segments (click for full size)
In the table above we are able to compare pages by all metrics available. For example, we can see that while the Analytics section has higher revenue, this is related to the number of impressions, which is also significantly higher. When we analyze further, we see that the Testing and Targeting sections have a good potential, with the same CTR but significantly higher AdSense eCPM. Based on these metrics we can understand which templates and content types are the most effective. 

As mentioned above, once you find out which pages are performing well and which pages are not, you can use Content Experiments to optimize them. Here is a Content Experiments guide.

Closing Thoughts

Here are a few takeaways for you to start optimizing today!
  1. Understand which content type and subject generates the highest revenue and create content based on this data.
  2. Understand which page templates bring the best results by using advanced segments.
  3. Analyze AdSense performance to learn which segments have a good CTR; this might bring insight into which audience to target.
Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Google Analytics team