Reporting is a very integral part of search engine marketing (and
digital marketing in general). Of course, it’s important to be able to
show the return on investment (ROI) of the digital budget. However, by
using reports to analyze performance, search engine marketers can
optimize their accounts by changing bids, adding or pausing keywords,
rotating in new ad copy, etc. Needless to say, it’s important to be very
familiar with the reporting options that are available.
Last
week, in Step-By-Step: Your First Keyword Report, you learned how to
pull your first PPC report at the keyword level. The process for
creating that report in Google AdWords is fairly similar to the method
you will use to pull other reports. For example, you will choose your
date range, the types of data you want to see, and select campaigns and
ad groups for reporting. In addition you can set filters and even
schedule these reports to run automatically. One of the best practices
that I think is important to try to institute into your process early on
is to not pull everything in a report. Try to narrow down exactly what
you’re looking for and not bring in useless rows and columns that can
clutter things up. You can always go back and add to reports later.
1.
Ad performance:
This self-evident report allows you to view performance
data for each of your ads. Be careful how you view your ad data because
it might be very dependent on the keywords that triggered the
impressions more than that ads themselves. Of course the ads are vital
to the performance, but if you’re going to look at the ad level, try
viewing it all at the ad group level first. If you set up your campaigns
with very tightly themed ad groups (as I recommended), this data will
make more sense. Try to look for common themes that either spike or drop
performance such as using pricing or strong calls to action in the ad
text. This may help you come up with some winning directions to take
your next creative build.
2. URL performance:
This report allows you to view performance data for each of your
Destination URLs. Obviously, if you’re using one or just a handful of
landing page URLs, this report might not be very helpful for you. But,
if you have many URLs, especially ones that follow a certain hierarchy
of your site, it may be useful to see which combinations of keywords,
ads and web pages are bringing in the highest return. For example, are
you selling more items by sending traffic directly to the product pages,
the category pages or the sub-category pages? What about lead
generation? Are more people filling out your lead form if they’re sent
to a specific info page or to the home page?
3.
Ad group performance:
This report allows you to view ad group
performance data for one or more of your campaigns. If you do have
tightly themed ad groups, it might be easier to manage your keywords at
the group level than at the keyword level. Sure, you can go in every now
and then and adjust your keywords, but it may be easier in the
day-to-day grind to optimize 100 ad groups vs. 10,000 keywords.
4.
Campaign performance:
This report allows you to view performance data
for your campaigns. Because the campaign level data is easy to see from a
single screen in the interface, you would probably only need to pull
this report for historical purposes. For example, you can set the date
range to go back several years and then choose the unit of time in
months. This way you could get a good month-over-month look at how your
account has been performing.
5. Account
performance:
This report allows you to view performance data for your
entire account. As with the campaign performance report, you probably
only need to pull this report when you want to focus on comparing units
of time against each other.
6. Demographic
performance:
This report allows you to view performance data for sites
by demographic. Demographic information (male/female, age, etc) is not
available for your search campaigns. You should know that Google offers
more than just advertising on search engine results page. Their ad
network, the Google Content Network, is one of the largest (if not the
largest) ad networks in the world and allows advertisers to put ads on
various sites around the internet. I’ll discuss the Google Content
Network (and placement targeted campaigns) in future posts of this
column.
7. Geographic performance:
This report
allows you to view performance data by geographic origin. The geographic
performance report shows you approximately where your visitors are
coming from, based on their IP addresses or any locations included in
their search queries. Use the report to reach your marketing objectives
by reviewing the data as free market research and as a basis for
optimizing a national campaign by region. For example, if you find that
users from the east coast are converting higher than those on the west
coast, you may want to change your campaign settings to just target
those higher converting areas. As well, you may find some great
intelligence to share with your advertiser about which parts of the
country (or world) are searching for product or brand terms. This may be
a good indicator for which regions could use more offline marketing
efforts.
8. Search query performance:
This
report allows you to view performance data for search queries which
triggered your ad and received clicks. This report is one of the new(er)
reports from Google and is a great source of data from your campaign.
Remember, the keyword which gets credit for an impression, click or
conversion may not be the exact keyword or phrase that triggered the
actual ad. Does that make sense?
Remember how
broad match works to cast a wide net for you? So, if you see that an
impression was recorded for the term cake, the actual query may have
been pineapple upsidedown cake or even cake walk. Because cake appeared
in the query string, your ad was triggered. The more general the term,
the more often you’ll find various iterations and versions that can
trigger it to show an ad. By looking through the search query
performance report, you’ll be able to uncover keywords that are
triggering ads but you may not have in your account. It’s better to add
these keywords (or make them negative keywords) so that you can have
better control over their spend and optimization.
That’s it.
There are some good reports here for you to check out. Once your account
has accrued a good data set (maybe two or three weeks worth), try
running some of these reports to see what you can find. It’s good to get
used to start seeing the data now so that you’re more familiar with it
later.
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