I think you can pull down a secondary dimension in GA for AdGroup/Campaign ID, also.

Hey, great question about ranking, but let's back up for a minute. I think the content of the piece has more to do with the format than the desired ranking of that format. yes "Content is King" but only valuable & good content....

What is the content? Is it time sensitive? Is it a category? Do you plan on adding new information to this content? Do you want people to engage with it or take an action to benefit your company? What is the CTA?

Assuming you're using it for adwords, it has a direct business relation to your purpose. So I think it should be a static page on the site (or what you're referring to as a landing page) because blog posts typically allow for a wide variety of actions to be taken on the page whereas a strong PPC intended landing page will need to be more specific and directed. There might be a different type of page that works better for organic traffic than PPC traffic, but that should come from several rounds of testing.

This is definitely a job for Analytics!

Typically you can see how important paid search is to your funnel by looking at the Assisted Conversion Funnel in the Conversions section of Analytics. The closer to 1.0 each channel gets means that it is more important to the completion of that funnel.

Or, here's a quick way I just worked out for you to see how many times PPC touches a converting funnel where Direct is also involved... I don't typically work this out from this direction so my math could be incorrect. You'll want to look to the Multi-Channel Funnel > Top Conversion Paths report, select the conversion metric you are most interested in viewing (we can only see multi-channel paths for conversions with this method), and set the lookback date to 90 days, and choose to list more than 10 instances. I chose all of mine for this experiment.

Download the Top Conversion Paths for your transaction. The sample size I had was 187 different conversion paths. But the client I was viewing also had a "greater than 5 min on site" goal and the number of paths to that was 4113. There are so many ways someone can come to your site, so don't forget to be open minded about the paths that people take!

I filtered this list of 187 paths to just PPC (66) then I used this function {=SUM(LEN(A192:A236)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A192:A236,"Direct","")))/LEN("Direct")}* to find all the instances of Direct within those (317). For this particular conversion type, we see 20.8% of conversion funnels that involved PPC and Direct, 16.8% that involved PPC and Direct and Organic. But this could have been a funnel that was as bizarre as: Social > Email > Direct > Organic > PPC > Email > Direct. It will take a lot more granularity & descriptive funnel naming to pick out what instances of these started or ended with NonBrand or Brand searches.

• This function must be entered as an Array, so instead of just hitting ENTER when you submit it to a cell, you must CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER to get it to work, thus the brackets will show in the cell.

Google does have a TOS line against doorway pages: sending traffic to Domain1.com, but Domain1.com has no other purpose than to send its traffic based on any action to Domain2.com

That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear that this happened to you. I don't think there's anything you can do against this, but I do have a few questions just to get a better understanding of what was going on, if you don't mind sharing.

How much was your budget?
For what match type?
What was your CPC? 
What location were you targeting? 
What niche are you in?

I'm mostly backing up everything David has already mentioned. There's no shortcut, and you really want to have specific adgroups to specific location pages for more reasons than just CTR (but it's still a really good reason).

You also will never have location specific data to improve upon, which is the entire reason you would want to send PPC there anyway - to be able to improve and measure.

If the page you are sending people to dynamically changes based on their IP then you can easily duplicate one adgroup structure for one city into several by using the adwords editor. Then use the replace feature to cut out the city information you're looking for and insert the next location. Also, you can use the term "[City] area" to help generalize.

Also when I've done location specific targeting using adgroups targeted just around the term "local" is also helpful. Then you can set the radius of your targeting out further and capture a wider audience.

Hey! This is a common issue between AdWords and GA. Analytics is tracking the number of visits, and AdWords is tracking the number of clicks. I'm not completely up to speed on what qualifies as an actual Visit to GA but it's not the same as what you're paying for. Sometimes when people don't stay long enough to count as a GA defined visit, it won't appear when reviewing traffic sources.

And when you see higher numbers in GA than in AdWords, there are a few other things that could be happening as well. AdWords is always about 4-6 hours behind the real up to date time. So as long as you aren't looking at today only, this shouldn't be a factor. Google also will credit you for what they believe to be fraudulent clicks, so they will also lower your numbers in AdWords.

What kind of variance are you seeing?

Also, you may want to look at the Advertising>AdWords>Campaigns section instead of the Traffic Sources section. I don't know when Analytics starts tracking last non-direct touch (if that's only in the goals or if that's throughout). But as soon as you leave the Advertising tab, things start to get wonky.

Matthew, Joram & Branden have all provided really great answers, and it looks like you're on the right track.

Have you connected your analytics account with your adwords account? Here's how if you haven't yet. I know there's been some redesigning going on insight Analytics, but it should still be the majority of the same information. Might take a bit of trial & error though.

IF you've already set up GA & AW then you should be able to see AdWords conversions filtering into your current goals. Go to the Conversions section, then go to Overview. In the refreshed screen, select by Source / Medium. This will give you a decent idea of how AdWords has been helping.

Generally, I would say that if you don't know how AdWords has been contributing to your bottom line, then I wouldn't increase budget. Are you managing all online marketing for your company?

John and Rui have handled the technical aspects of how retargeting is really valuable, but with the number of visitors you have in the retargeting list I'm really curious what other settings you have for this campaign.

How many impressions have been set per unique visitor? 
How low are your bids? I would say keep them at about $1.50 CPC (not CPM) and see how things go. If you're already at this level then you may want to consider increasing your costs a little more.

Yes Retargeting is going to be cheap, but please keep in mind that Click to Conversion is not the only way to track retargeting progress. Be sure to use the View-Through Conversion column as well.

CTRs will always be low because that is the nature of the display network (sometimes getting a .12% CTR is as good as it gets).

Other things you need to pay attention to are how old is your messaging? What is the message you are using for everyone? Do you only have one product and so is one message OK? As John mentioned in his comment - you should have multiple segmented lists from the initial retargeting list. Some people are not ready for a hard sell. Some need to be reminded that you exist first.

Also, what pages are you using for your retargeting code? This will also have a significant impact in how you see returns come in. (Hint: start with Confirmation or Thank You pages first, then slowly build out from there and segment the lists accordingly)

Google wants there to be a completely fair way to bid on keywords that you are not SEO-perfect for. CPC can be used as a general indicator for competitiveness of the industry, but it's not directly considered when ranking.

oh! ok

I dunno, I think that sounds pretty normal. I would only start cutting keywords out if they were high cost, no return.

So since you work in a really niche market, and if you want to test the theory of "buy X" v just "X", then I would request incremental budget from marketing to run a 2-3 week test on your major head terms on broad match. then look at the search query report for only that keyword during that test time to get some new ideas for keywords to target.

Yes to what Dave said.

"big broad terms are expensive and usually have a higher Cost Per Conversion. Long-tails are more specific, cheaper and lead to more conversions."

The term "widget" is a big, broad term.
The term "best widget for email" is long-tail.

What types of widgets are you selling? Some example modifiers could be

desktop widget
Mail widget
Best mail widget
Best widget for email
Android widget for mail

Does this help clarify?

Yes to what David & Dave have said.

To add, I think you should also not be targeting the term "widget" so generally. "buy" probably isn't the best modifier you could use, or the best use of your time if you have a lengthy list of one word keywords.

I would hope that you are advertising on more keywords than just broad head terms, like "HP" "Windows" "Widget" "Tech" "Money" "word" -- i went a little off topic there, but I'm sure you get the point.

You should rely minimally on big, broad terms like these but instead,  target longer 2-4 word phrases more frequently. It will improve your CPC and overall ROI.