One “mistake” that we consistently see when conducting one of our AdWords account audit and strategy sessions or when beginning work with a new client is that the AdWords report center is not used effectively, or maybe even not at all. In order to know what is working, what is not working and how to make your account better you need to make use of this feature.
You can access the report center by clicking the “Reporting” tab found at the top of the AdWords user interface and selecting reports.
Once the next screen loads you will find reports ranging from individual keyword performance to ad performance – even discovering the exact search queries that are being made on Google.com that then show your ad and delivered a visitor to your site.
There are 11 reports in all.
At the very least, we recommend running an Account Performance report for the past few months at a week-by-week basis to spot major trends.
A few of the other reports we recommend utilizing on a regular basis are:
- Placement/Keyword Performance: a favorite. This report will allow you to view performance data for every keyword in your account and discover how often each particular keyword shows your ad, how many clicks a keyword generates, how many conversions a keyword is responsible for and more.
- Search Query Performance: one of our other favorites! This will allow you to see the exact search queries being made on Google.com that then show your ad and generated a visitor to your site by way of your ad being clicked. This is an exceptional report for identifying new keywords to be added and also, new negative keywords.
- Placement Performance: a newer favorite! This will allow you to see specific performance for any website placement you have added to your content network campaigns.
It should be noted that both the Search Query Performance report and the Placement Performance report can be run directly in the AdWords user interface for any date range that you decide to select. For small, quick changes to your account on a frequent basis this is the best way to utilize these reporting features.
However, we prefer to run these two specific reports via the report center for extended date periods and then download the data that is populated into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. This way you have a great deal of data at your disposal all at once, allowing for greater sweeping changes, which can be conducted in AdWords Editor for robust optimizations to your AdWords account.
Whichever way you personally choose to utilize Google AdWords reports, it’s imperative to take advantage of them (especially the three highlighted above). By doing so you will be able to out perform your competition; and if you use all 11 of them, there will be no stopping your ads.
For more info, you can see video and get three free tips from the publishers of the ROI Revolution here.
