A look at reporting: Google AdWords Essential Training

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

A look at reporting: Google AdWords Essential Training

- Now that you've created a campaign, it's time to measure your ad performance. You can analyze basing account, campaign, and add group information using different data and reports available in AdWords. There are also advanced reports that go beyond the number of clicks, or impressions you're getting, allowing you to see the impact AdWords has on your business. But, where do you begin? Well, I recommend that you start by spending 15 to 30 minutes a week reviewing your account. The statistics and reports available will help you make informed decisions about your ad, and let you know where you need to make changes by seeing what works, and what hasn't, over time.

Let's look at a sample campaign I set up a few weeks ago for a company in town called RentTrack. RentTrack has a very innovative service where landlords and property managers can accept rent online, and tenants can pay rent online and build their credit simultaneously. Now in their dashboard, which I've logged in to, I'm here on the Campaigns screen, you can see that we have three campaigns, only one of which is running. The first thing I like to do in the morning when start checking on my data is drill into my active campaigns, and look at the big picture.

So we'll select this first campaign here at the top. Next, I like to enable the Graph view, which you can do with this icon just to the right of the word Columns. Initially, I'm looking at my current click performance over time. I can see that clicks are increasing, and this could indicate that my ad positions are changing, my quality score is getting better, and so on. But to really help you distinguish what's going on, you can compare variables. So here on the left hand side, I can see that Clicks are compared versus None. If I select None, in the drop down I can hover over Performance, and then choose Impressions.

And now we're seeing our impressions compared to our clicks over time. Interesting. So I can see that the ad started seeing more impressions, and the clicks increased as a result. Let's say now I want to look at impressions versus something. Well, on the left I'll choose Clicks, hover over Performance, and then choose Impressions. And where we selected Impressions, I'll hover over Performance, and choose Average Position. Interesting. So our ad positions didn't change much, but we still saw more impressions.

This likely tells me that we had more people searching for the keywords within this campaign. But let's drill further to start to really understand what's going on. Here below, you can see that this campaign has a multiple ad groups running within it. Let's drill into this first ad group. Again, you could start by reviewing the same information in the chart at the top of the screen, and then you want to review the data in the table below. Here, we're in the keyword view, and I would look at the individual keywords, followed by its click through rate, which you can select by clicking onto the label that you'd like in the column that you want to sort.

Now one thing I should point out is that often times, click through rates look really exciting. In this case, the top click to rate is 10%, which is a great number, but when I look at the number of impressions, ten, that's probably not all that meaningful. Whereas this keyword down lower, which has 125 impressions, and a 4% click through rate, sounds little bit more realistic to me. Now I'll go to the top and choose Ads from the tab view, to view my ads that are running within this ad group. There are four ads in this ad group, and you can see that some of these ads are not being served.

And you'll see that here in the column labeled Served, and down at the bottom I can see that this fourth ad has a 0% serve rate. The top ad has been served 52% of the time, 12%, and then 35%. This is because there's just not enough impressions happening for my limited keywords. If I wanted to force these ads to be served, so I could test which perform better, I would pause the individual ads and wait for the data to come in on the ads that don't have any. Now, you should also review your impressions, your click through rate, the average cost per click, and your average position, for each of your ads.

There are several ways that you can customize your data, adjusting date ranges, columns, segments, filters, and graphs. First things first, you can bring in any additional data you'd like, by choosing the Columns menu here towards the top of the screen, and then selecting Modify Columns from the drop down. It's in this view that you can select to add any additional columns, which should appear on the right hand side. You can also remove columns by selecting the Remove link. In this case, let's say that we want to go to Performance and bring in our average CPM.

I would choose Add, and now you'll notice that this has been added to the bottom of the list, and then I'll chose Apply. If I scroll to the right, you'll see that average CPM is now listed in our table view. Remember, you can leverage these options for most of the tabbed views that have this table down below. Segments are another great way to analyze and improve your performance. Segments allow you to split your data into rows, based on the information that matters to you most, such as periods of time, click type, or device. There are multiple segments that you can use, and your choices vary, depending on which tab of your AdWords account you're viewing.

When using segments, you want to prepare your data by choosing the account level at which you want to look at your data, such as a campaign, or an Ad Group. We'll do that by selecting Campaigns here at the top of the screen. And first, I'll choose a date range here in the upper right hand corner. In this case, let's look at data for the last 30 days. Next, just below the tab view, towards the top of the screen, select the drop down next to the word Segment. You can select any of these various options, to segment your data. We can segment by time, say by week, I'll select that, and show you what happens.

Here, down below, we can see an aggregate view for each ad by each week. I'll scroll back to the top of the screen and choose Campaigns for my tab view, and again, select Segment, Time, and then Week. Here we can see each campaigns aggregate data by week. There are also other things that we can segment. We can segment by Conversions, Network, Click type, Device, Experiment, and so on. If I select Device, we can now see which percentage of our ads are serving via computers, and which on mobile devices, or tablets.

You can only apply one segment at a time in your statistics table, but you can apply multiple segments to your data if you choose to download a report. Once your statistics table, which is this table here, looks the way you want, just click the Download button here under the Add Extensions tab, to create and schedule a report. You can see that there's already a segment for Device, and below that, we have the link Add Segment. So if I wanted to add multiple segments, I would continue selecting this.

And you can choose up to three segments, so I could Segment by Month, and then I can choose Click type, and now I'm going to get Devices segmented by Month, segmented by Click type. And then you would choose Download to download that report. You can also look at the Dimensions tab, which is the far right tab here at the top of the screen. This allows you to look at data across your entire account, an individual campaign, or an ad group. You would use the different dimensions, such as different times of the day, or days of the week, to gain more insight into your ad performance and help you identify opportunities for optimization.

Here in the Dimensions tab you can select the Filter, and create a filter, if you'd like to filter by any variables, such as you Impression share, Conversions, or Performance. You also have the opportunity to select the View, and you can search by Conversions, Labels, Time. In this case, I can sort by Time and Week, just like we did in our segment view. Now this data is going to be aggregating all online campaigns, because that's the area of the site that we're in, noted by the heading here at the top of the screen.

You can also select the View again, and in Time, you can even choose Hour of Day. This might be an opportunity to track and add performance on an hourly basis to see how well it's performing at different times throughout the day. Then you can use these insights to schedule your ads for the hours when they're most likely to receive the greatest number of impressions and clicks. Another useful view is the Geographic, and Users Location view. You can see individual regions where your clicks came from and use the information to refine your location targeted.

And you would select, from the View, Geographic. And that's the fundamentals of using the built in reporting features. In the next movie, we'll take a look at three important reports to become familiar with.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/google-adwords-essential-training-2/a-look-at-reporting