Calculate AdWords ROI with Ad Slot Position Segments

Google AdWords provides a “quick and easy” way to get visitors to your site. Setting up campaigns are fairly easy and the learning curve is small. But maximizing your ad spend takes time, patience, and planning. One of the often-overlooked methods for measuring optimal AdWords campaign success is seeing which Ad Slots tend to be the most profitable. If your CPC is high and conversions are low, it may not be the wisest thing to open the flood gates and bid with the expectation of holding the top slot.

Setting Ad Slot Position in Advanced Segments

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You can add these segments through these share links I created.

Going through the AdWords subsection (Traffic Sources > AdWords) with different Ad Slot segments selected you can compare valuable metrics which will tell you quite a bit about how Keyword ad positions are performing.

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Going deeper, we can compare ad slot data at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level.

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One of the caveats..at this point it appears that Google Analytics doesn’t include Clicks (though you can get more or less the same information from Visits), impressions, or ROI (though you can calculate this yourself).

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