An AdWords Report You Need To Run And Review TODAY!

This is one of my favorite adwords reports - the daily summary of campaign or ad group performance in visual form…check it out:

1. Log into your AdWords account and click on the Reports tab…then click on Create Report.

2. Choose a Report type - either ‘ad group’ or ‘campaign’ is probably preferred.

3. Set up your settings - set View (Unit of Time) to Daily, select a date range and select your campaigns.

4. Advanced settings - click on ‘Add or Remove Columns’…you can pick and choose your key performance metrics - I like to add ‘Conversions’ and ‘Cost per Conversion’ to this report.

Filter your results if you want - I will separate content vs search in some cases.

5. Name your report, Save it as a trend analysis template so you don’t have to run through every setting each time you want to glance at this report.

6. Create your report!!!

Let’s take a look at what you can find in this report:

While you are viewing your report, look for a drop down located on the right side of the page underneath the date. Click through your key performance metrics and note any trends.

I quickly reviewed conversions in the following image and I drew some red lines to show the trends I can see so far this quarter: (Please click on the image to get a close up view.)

What to do next

Run isolated reports (tighter date range or single day with an hourly summary) similar to the one that we just ran to see if you can identify any problems or solutions…for example, what did we do around May 18 that brought our volume back up substantially? What were the cost differences? Is it worth it? What was my avg position during the downward trend? Etc.

The visualization of trends over time make it easier to find correlations - at what average position did you receive the most conversions? What was the average cpc for that day? Do you see any peaks or valleys that you can isolate or replicate?

We manage one account where we found 4 or 5 days over the four months where conversion volumes were 20-30% higher than normal so we ran reports for those days only and began to replicate, as much as we could, those conditions and we started to see a steady 10-20% gain in volume from that day forward…

When all is said and done, this process - given a decent sized account - could take about an hour. This single hour could give you a week or two of work!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or get email updates whenever we post anything new!

1. Cool, New Geographic Report In AdWords
   A new geographic report is now available in Google AdWords, according to the AdWords blog this morning. By reporting the geographic distribution of where clicks...
2. Search Trends That Surround A Disaster
   I love Google Trends...we can learn a lot, speculate a lot, and try to see/prepare for trends BEFORE they happen... Whenever an unfortunate event or...
3. Get The Adwords API!
   API stands for "Application Programming Interface," which in normal-people-terms means "A way for you to tap into a program from your own program." Using APIs,...

Leave a Reply