Cost Data Import Google Analytics

Key Takeaways

in this week's video I'm going to show you how you can import your cost data from all your non-google channels into Google Analytics this is going to make it a lot easier for PPC advertisers to be your cost versus return metrics for all your PPC channels all within one location it's gonna save you a lot of time I promise so let's dive in each advertising channel is going to export your data in different ways but no matter what your export looks like you're going to have to format certain components exactly how Google Analytics requires it in order for your data import to be accepted here's an example of a cost report I created an exported from Microsoft ads the first thing I typically do is to make sure that there is no additional information on the report besides the main columns that I have when I scroll down I can see there's a total column and then there's also the Microsoft copyright I want to get rid of this additional information that we do not need to upload to Google Analytics after that is complete I want to go back up and add two additional columns that typically aren't going to be in your reports that you export from your channels these columns are going to be our source and medium columns these two columns are absolutely necessary if you want to separate out in Google Analytics which advertising channel your cost data is coming from now I want to make sure my date is formatted properly for the data import in Google Analytics this particular Microsoft Ads report is pulling the keyword metrics by individual day and that's fine but I need to make sure the date is formatted properly so highlight every single date in your report then we want to format the cells make it a custom format and I can create my own we need the date to be the four-digit year than the two-digit month then the two-digit date then we hit okay and now the dates for my import are formatted correctly the last change we need to make is to make sure our headers are also formatted properly the way Google needs them to be uploaded there is a reason I am changing every single column header you have to make sure the column header exactly matches the data set schema options you will see later on within Google Analytics if there are any misspellings or if you don't capitalize the proper letters your whole data import will get rejected the column headers have to be 100% perfect and once we have our report formatted properly we could save it when we save as we want to make sure we're saving it as the CSV ms-dos after our report is saved in the proper format let's head on to Google Analytics we can start importing the data once you are in your Google Analytics account head over to your admin page at the very bottom of your properties column you will see the data import option after we click on data import we will see the option to create a new data import there are several data set types that you can add to Google Analytics but this video is about cost data so we want the option that's at the very bottom you will then need to name the report and then select the views that we'll be able to use the data set hit continue we then want to add the additional columns that we had within our report you can now see why the column headings are so important your column headers have to match the ID that pulls up within the dataset schema that is in Google Analytics if you have any of these off by a little bit whether it's a capitalization or one letters misspelled your data import is going to get rejected you're gonna have to correct those errors in your excel file and then re-upload that later to fix the errors but if everything looks good head down and click Save click done and then we want to go back to that data import manage the uploads and then we want to upload our file so let's choose our cost data file that we created and then upload originally your file is gonna be validating but as we can see in this one it registered and was completed pretty quickly if I go back to my data import we can see my file is there with the data set ID I can manage uploads if in case you need to correct any errors that we will see which I did not get if you did get an error you can always go back to manage uploads correct the error re-upload the files you can update the files with any additional information if you choose to but if you don't have any errors you are set to go now I can't speak for everyone but from my personal experience I've seen it take anywhere from an hour to a little bit over a day for the data to sometimes show up within Google Analytics but once we start seeing that data we can now view the cost data with our other channels once our cost data has been uploaded to Google Analytics you can head over to your custom reports or anywhere where you can view cost data and start looking at that information in this example I'm just creating a custom report tossing a few random metrics you can see I have my source and medium as the Bing CPC so I know I'm pulling from my Microsoft ads upload if I just click Save looking at an appropriate date range from the same dates that I uploaded in my data import we can now see in my Bing campaigns and now we get the cost date and now I can compare it to the goal completions I'm getting for this campaign so besides it's doing this for Microsoft ads you can do this for all your other channels maybe you want to create a custom report that shows just the source and medium breakouts in the secondary dimension so you can compare all the different channels and their cost data it's totally up to you but now you have the step by steps that you need to upload your cost data from all your other channels within Google Analytics so you can get more information of how your campaigns are performing collectively thanks for watching our video make sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel to see more videos