To accomplish a doubling of results usually means an intense combination of additional keyword discovery, tighter Ad Group and ad creative development (including conducting A/B split tests), and a profit-oriented approach to bidding in Google's content network.

But prior to the new Google Analytics AdWords Analysis report, analyzing the profitability (or lack thereof) of ads placed on the Google content network was a difficult exercise at best.

Let's take a look at an ROI calculation on the Google Content network as the perfect example.

Prior to the new report you could use either the Google Analytics "All CPC Analysis" report or the "CPC Vs Organic Conversion" report but the problem lay in the fact that you could only see the results of your bidding in the Google Content network amongst your *entire* Google AdWords account.

This report shortcoming made analyzing the profitability of specific Ad Groups in the Google Content network impossible without workarounds. This task was only slightly improved in the "Campaign ROI" report because you could see the Content network profitability on a per-campaign basis, but alas, not on an Ad Group level. And if you are doing anything worthwhile in AdWords, at minimum you have multiple Ad Groups per campaign.

In order to overcome these shortcomings of the last several months, we developed several workarounds including manually-tagging Google AdWords ad-creatives with the Urchin utm tracking codes and developing specific tagging for conducting A/B split tests. All of this is no longer necessary, thanks to the new Google Analytics "AdWords Analysis" report.

Bottom line: be sure to enable auto-tagging in the Google AdWords account which is properly linked, then use the new "AdWords Analysis" report in Google Analytics to analyze the profitability of your Google Content (and Search) network bidding on an Ad Group level, and with further granularity at the keyword level for the Google search network.

Finally, to determine which ad creative (when conducting A/B split tests of ad creatives) resulted in the best results, click on the maroon colored "Analysis Options" button (located just in front of the numbered list of Ad Groups or keywords, an example of which is shown below) to then select the "Cross Segment Performance" option, and then finally select "Content" and you'll see which ad creative resulted in the highest $/Visit (i.e. revenue/# of visits).

Update: The Google Analytics Blog posts a nice graphic of the "Cross Segment Performance" option here.

For assistance with starting a new (or overhauling/fine tuning an existing) Google AdWords CPC advertising campaign, contact the friendly staff at ROI Revolution today.