Google Ads →

Formerly called Google Adsense, now just known as Google Ads is where you can bid for ad space on the web.

There are two main type of ads:

1. Text ads are ads that show on Google search result page.
2. Display ads are ads that appear on the google ad network which is composed of million of pages.

For Text ads you can choose what searched keywords you want to be shown in. Each keyword has a different price range based on popularity and demand, but you don’t pay ahead of time. Instead, you’ll have to set a max bid amount, basically the amount you’re willing to pay for one (1) click. Typically the highest bidders will be placed on the top of the search results page. The cool thing is that you only get charged if a user actually clicks on the ad! This is known as Cost Per Click (CPC). To avoid over spending, you can set a max budget per day, which Google will try to stay within.

You can fine tune the ads to only show up for certain geographical areas and during certain times. Or even on certain devices. There’s a lot of flexibility.

Setting up a keyword campaign is simple. You choose a keyword which you can designate using the following matches:

• Broad match - no wrap is needed
  • will show your for relatable searches
• Phrase match - wrap keyword in quotes ""
  • will show your ad if search includes words of similar meaning
• Exact match - wrap keyword in brackets []
  • exact meaning including synonyms for words

You can also use Negative keywords, to say which words you don’t want to be used to show your ad. It’s like an exclusion.

You can create split variations to determine which of the variations converts users the most. You can keep fine tuning.

There’s a tool provided by Google called Keyword Planner where you can see how often are the keywords searched for and also the bidding range.

Google Adsense →

Do you have good quality content and want to make some money? Google Adsense is made exactly for that. You can display ads on your site and get paid for it! For mobile apps there’s Admob.

Google Analytics →

You’ll eventually want to capture data about your website to make informed decisions. Google Analytics help you collect data and apply some analysis.

Before July 2023, Google Analytics used Universal Analytics (UA) system, but now they have switched it to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) which is the only way going forward.

With UA, you had a hierarchy of the following:

• Accounts (various brand accounts)
  • Properties (different properties like web, mobile, etc)
    • Views (specific filterable data)
      • you would be able to set several filters to transform the data i.e. removing data from internal employees, or just from a country.

With GA4, Views no longer exist. You can see the differences between the two.

With analytics the main ideas to track are:

1. Acquisition: how did they end up on your web site?
2. Behavior: what activities did they do on your web site?
3. Conversion: where you able to convert them? For example maybe click a button or buy a product.

You can create Campaigns to test your advertising. To track this we can use URL builder that includes the following query 5 parameters:

• utm_source
• utm_medium
• utm_campaign
• utm_term
• utm_content

You can also directly link it with your Google Ads to track your campaigns more seamlessly!

You can setup Goals to track funnels and determine where in the goal are users dropping. It is helpful to later be able to fine tune your website to reduce drops.