Understanding AdWords Statistics and Reports

Chapter 8Understanding AdWords Statistics and Reports In This Chapter Viewing account statistics Peering into campaigns and Ad Groups Creating AdWords reports The preceding chapter intro

Chapter 8

Understanding AdWords Statistics and Reports

In This Chapter

Viewing account statistics

Peering into campaigns and Ad Groups

Creating AdWords reports

The preceding chapter introduced the parts of the AdWords Control Center you use to create the initial Ad Group required to open an account That chapter offered a glimpse of screens for writing ad copy, assigning keywords and estimating their traffic, determining Campaign settings, establishing cost-per-click (CPC) bids, and setting a daily budget

There’s more to the Control Center than the few screens you see when opening

an account It’s not an exaggeration to say that devoted AdWords advertisers and agents spend the bulk of their work day in the Control Center, especially

if they don’t use third-party tracking and reporting tools to measure click-throughs and conversions Google’s Control Center is not perfect (and I pick apart some imperfections in the next chapter), but it is a complex, sophisti-cated suite of research, creative, and reporting tools

You can see in Figure 8-1 that the Control Center presents three organizational tabs Rather than divide its functionality according to those tabs, however, it’s more useful to consider what the Control Center does for you in the course of your day-to-day AdWords-obsessed life

Four basic functions come into play:

 View your campaigns in progress The Control Center provides a

lay-ered view of your entire account: your individual Campaigns, each Ad Group in a campaign, and the performance of every ad and every key-word associated with your ads All this information flows onto your

Control Center screens rapidly, but not exactly in real time I’ve seen early statistics of an added marketing element show up within minutes At the most, allow a three-hour delay for impressions and clickthroughs to come into view and jive with each other When campaigns are running continu-ously, without intermittent pausing and resuming (see Chapter 10), you must cut three hours of slack when you look at them The only way to get a complete, static snapshot of marketing statistics is to pause one or more elements of your account and then allow three hours for the dust

to settle

 Report your marketing statistics The Control Center’s information

screens are flexible and robust in their capacity to offer views of your advertising at work AdWords reports take your marketing metrics to the next level by offering more detailed, customized views and automatic e-mail delivery of the reports

 Research keywords This book describes non-Google keyword research

tools, but the AdWords Control Center provides everything needed in many cases The Keyword Suggestion Tool and Traffic Estimator give any marketer plenty of ideas for experimentation and refinement

 Adjust basic account properties The Control Center keeps track of your

billing and payment information, display language, and log-in password

Figure 8-1:

The AdWords Control Center, where advertis-ers view campaigns

in progress

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This chapter is primarily concerned with statistics and reports Chapter 9 is more involved with the creative side of the Control Center — producing new

Ad Groups and selecting keywords

Viewing Account Statistics

The Control Center presents three essential views of your AdWords marketing

These views are like boxes within boxes The account holds your Campaigns;

your Campaigns hold your Ad Groups; your Ad Groups hold your ads and key-words The Reports section chops up the information into innumerable config-urations, like a Japanese chef working on a grill with one of those big knives at one of those cook-at-the-table restaurants (I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about, but the image came to mind.)

For each of the three main account views, you can see a table that lists your costs, impressions, clickthroughs, clickthrough rate (CTR), conversion rate, and the average position of your ad(s) on the page In each view, you may determine the timeframe (to the day) for which the numbers are calculated

All this takes place in the Campaign Management tab

The account overview Clicking the Campaign Management tab leads you directly to an overview of the entire account, as shown in Figure 8-1 The search box to the right is for advertisers running multiple campaigns, Ad Groups, and ads Use that box to search for campaigns, Ad Groups, keywords, and ad text

The Campaign Summary page (refer to Figure 8-1) contains several columns of information Together, they convey an essential overview of your campaigns:

 Campaign Name Simple enough; this is the name of your campaign.

 Current Status Campaigns may be active, paused, or deleted Deleted

Campaigns are not really deleted, oddly They’re in limbo and may be out of sight, but they’re still available for examination Even odder, deleted campaigns contribute to total statistics, in a unique row separate from the total statistics of active campaigns (see Figure 8-2) This extra total-ing occurs even when the deleted campaign is hidden from view When-ever you want to see your deleted campaigns, use the All Campaigns drop-down menu to select Show all campaigns (That setting also brings paused Campaigns into view.)

 Current Budget This column displays the daily budget for each

cam-paign and totals them at the bottom

 Clicks, Impr., and CTR These columns detail your campaign-wide ad

dis-tribution, breaking it down into clicks (clickthroughs of the Campaign’s ads), impressions (ad displays), and CTR (clickthrough rate, calculated

by dividing clicks by impressions) The CTR column is vitally important, because Google requires certain CTR levels for campaigns and keywords

If the campaign’s CTR sinks below 0.5 percent, Google might step in to remedy the situation Even if the campaign’s CTR remains stoutly above that threshold, individual keywords inside the campaign might get into trouble

 Avg CPC This view does not divulge your cost-per-click bid for any Ad

Group in the campaign, but it does reveal the average cost you’re paying for all clicks, campaign-wide

 Cost This column totals up the cost-to-date for the campaign, by

multi-plying clicks by costs-per-clicks

 Conv Rate and Cost/Conv These columns fill with numbers when the

campaign uses Google’s Conversion Tracking, which I describe in Chap-ter 9

Figure 8-2:

Deleted Campaigns contribute their obsolete statistics

to the bottom line

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Use the drop-down menus above the table to define a date period Click the upper radio button to select from the pull-down menu of time frames

Click the lower radio button next to use the month-day-year menus

Note the check box to the left of each campaign Click one or more to select campaigns to pause, resume, or delete You may also adjust Cam-paign settings for multiple camCam-paigns on a single screen I describe the Campaign Settings page in Chapter 7, but I want to revisit that screen here Figure 8-3 shows the Campaign Settings screen when more than one campaign is selected with check boxes As you can see, small arrows (they’re yellow) appear next to settings that you may apply to all checked campaigns (The Campaign name is the only setting that must remain unique.) As you adjust settings for the first campaign, click the yellow arrow whenever you want that new setting to take hold in the others You may scroll down and enter new values, overriding the arrow, at any time

Seeing inside the campaign

To drill into any campaign and see its Ad Groups, click any campaign link in the Campaign Name column (back in Figure 8-2) Figure 8-4 details the inside

of a campaign, showing several Ad Groups Many of the features on this page are the same as those in Figure 8-2, so I won’t repeat them here Note that deleted Ad Groups work just like deleted campaigns in that they remain accessible and their statistics contribute to the bottom line

Figure 8-3:

Adjust Campaign settings across multiple campaigns

You use the check boxes next to the Ad Groups (just as you use the ones next

to campaigns) to pause, resume, and delete multiple Ad Groups simultane-ously or affect just a single item You may also select multiple Ad Groups and click the Change Max CPC button As with the Campaign settings across mul-tiple campaigns (see the preceding section), the Change Max CPC feature enables you to enforce the same CPC bid across selected Ad Groups The (yellow) arrow is your friend again in this task, as you can see in Figure 8-5

Seeing inside the Ad Group Click any Ad Group name (see Figure 8-4) to see the keywords and ads in that

Ad Group Getting inside the Ad Group is where the rubber meets the road Where the pedal hits the metal Where other half-baked analogies that I can’t think up take place On these screens lurk Google’s evaluations of your key-word performance, in all their mystery, occasional threats, and sometimes encouragement This page is where your click, impression, and CTR statistics are broken down by keyword and by the two parts of Google’s extended net-work: search partners and content sites In addition to detailed reporting, this page contains your ad(s) associated with this Ad Group’s keywords, with the chance to edit those ads, delete them, or create new ones

Figure 8-4:

Viewing the

Ad Groups statistics of

a campaign

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The table that you see within an Ad Group (see Figure 8-6) present statistical totals above the reporting details A curious arrangement, and there’s noth-ing to do about it Notice, also, the two Total rows — one for “search” and one for “content targeting.” These cryptic labels need some explaining

If you read Chapter 7, you might remember that you have a choice, in Cam-paign Settings, to run your ads across the Google network of sites (If you’re next to the computer, try going to Campaign Settings to see that choice.) Specifically, you can opt to distribute all the ads of any campaign in one of four distribution patterns:

 Just on Google’s search pages These pages include search results

pages in Web search, Google Groups, Google Directory, and Froogle Your ads must run on these sites, regardless of how you adjust the other two settings

 On Google’s search pages, plus Google’s search partners These

other search sites include Web-search portals to which Google provides AdWords advertising As of this writing, these sites include Excite, About.com, Teoma, AskJeeves, Netscape, AOL Search, and Go.com You may opt in or out of this extended network of search sites If you opt in, your keyword statistics corresponding to Google pages plus other search pages are totaled in the Total — search row

Figure 8-5:

Set the maximum CPC bid across multiple Ad Groups

 On Google’s search pages, plus content sites in Google’s network.

Content sites are AdSense publishers that run AdWords ads (see Chapters 11, 12, and 13) On these sites, ads are chosen according to rel-evance to the content of the pages on which they appear, whereas on search pages, ads are matched by relevance to keywords used at those search engines You may opt in or out of the content network If you opt

in, your keyword statistics corresponding to the content network are totaled in the Total — content targeting row

 Distribute everywhere By opting into both the extended search network

and the content network, your ads appear throughout both those systems and on Google’s pages Keyword statistics for the entire arrangement are totaled on the row containing the keyword (see Figure 8-6), below the Total rows These totals combine the broken-out totals (search and con-tent targeting)

In reading about how the totals work, you perhaps noticed that you don’t get

keyword statistics corresponding to only Google pages You get Google pages

plus extended search pages bundled into one line of totals, but no statistics describing how your ads are performing on Google exclusive of the extended networks

Figure 8-6:

Looking inside an

Ad Group

at statistics for each keyword and, in this case, the only ad

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In my opinion, this lack is an outright deficiency, but you’re not totally clue-less about how your ads are faring in Google The Control Center issues one

of five status levels for each keyword, displayed in the Status column These status levels are

 Strong and Moderate (Both in green.) Strong and Moderate keywords

are cooking along fine No action is necessary

 At risk and Slowed (Both in yellow.) At risk keywords are in imminent

danger of being disabled by Google Slowed keywords cause the ad(s) associated with those keywords to suffer infrequent displays until you correct the situation

 Disabled (In red.) Disabled keywords take their associated ads out of

cir-culation on search pages and content pages matching those keywords

You may resuscitate your disabled keywords, but keeping them alive becomes harder after they have been disabled

Note: Chapter 9 explains in detail how to correct keywords that are at risk,

slowed, or disabled

Figure 8-7 illustrates a keyword statistics screen in an Ad Group, on which three different status levels are exhibited The warning atop the page (whose red background is quite alarming in color) appears when any keyword on the page has been slowed Figure 8-8 illustrates another page with the Disabled status in full display

Look at Figures 8-7 and 8-8, particularly at the keywords labeled At risk

(devel-opmental disabilities), Strong (charity auction), and Disabled (maroon 5) Look

at the CTR column for all three keywords Notice anything peculiar? The

Dis-abled keyword (maroon 5) owns a robust clickthrough rate of 1.7 percent — well above Google’s danger threshold of 0.5 percent The charity auction

keyword, labeled with the Strong status, owns a weak CTR of 0.4 percent The

keyword immediately above it (developmental disabilities), labeled At risk,

has performed better than the Strong keyword!

None of this seems to make any sense, but there’s a simple explanation Google computes a separate clickthrough rate based on the performance of ads on Google’s search pages, exclusive of the extended search and content networks

Google uses that CTR to evaluate the performance of keywords and their ads

Performance on the extended networks doesn’t matter in determining whether

a keyword is slowed or disabled However, Google doesn’t provide the result of this Google-only CTR calculation, preferring instead to furnish the status warn-ing system instead Because that crucial CTR number is not broken out from

the total CTR figures that do include the extended networks, the status warning

(and status praise) sometimes seems out of touch with reality as expressed in the CTR numbers This strange reality warp occurs when an ad performs much better or much worse in the extended networks than it does on Google’s pages

(The disparity isn’t too uncommon.) File this odd fact away for now; I come back to it with a vengeance in Chapter 10

Figure 8-8:

Google disables keywords after placing them at risk

in the Status column

Figure 8-7:

Google warns of underper-forming keywords, and praises those performing well, in the Status column

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