Chapter 11. Improving Performance

There’s a great deal of information contained in the average AdWords account. This information—ads and keywords and the related performance data—is stashed away in ad groups. These ad groups are themselves contained in AdWords campaigns.

To make effective use of AdWords, you need to be able to get to this information. In other words, drilling down into one ad group after another will only provide piecemeal data and usually won’t give you the kind of picture you need to improve performance.

For CPC ads, an ad group consists of the text of an ad and its targeted keywords, along with budget choices. For CPM ads, an ad group consists of the creative for the ad or its text, the targeted domains, and budget choices.

It’s pretty unlikely for an ad, or an ad campaign, to be perfect the first time round. A great part of the craft of creating effective campaigns is to see how your ads and campaigns are doing, tweak them, see how the improved ads and campaigns are doing, tweak again, and iterate the process. In other words, if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.

This chapter explains how to monitor your AdWords campaigns and AdWords ad groups performance, and how to use the tools that AdWords provides to improve ad and campaign performance.

Monitoring Your AdWords Activity

When you open AdWords, the initial screen you’ll see is the Account Snapshot, partially shown in Figure 11-1. By glancing at the Account Snapshots window, you can see whether there are any alerts or status messages that you need to pay attention to. You can also set up a watch list for specific campaigns.

Figure 11-1. The Account Snapshot screen is a centralized place for you to see messages from the system and watch specific campaigns

Of course, the most important thing is to keep frequent track of the progress of your ads. The key high-level questions are:

How much are you spending?
How effective are your ads?
How well are your keywords performing?

Two of the Account Status windows help you track your spending and ad effectiveness. Keyword Performance shows you how well your best performing keywords are doing at a glance (Figure 11-2).

Note

You can change the time frame of reference in the Keyword Performance applet, as is true of most of the AdWords performance review tools.

Figure 11-2. The Keyword Performance window will show you clicks, impressions, and CTR for your best performing keywords

The Campaign Performance window, shown in Figure 11-3, provides both a visual and metric overview of how all your campaigns are doing. You can set the graphics to display a variety of different statistics, including cost, clicks, and impressions. You can elect to display information for all your online campaigns or for a specific campaign (by clicking the downward arrow shown in Figure 11-3 next to All Online Campaigns).

Figure 11-3. The Campaign Performance window provides an at-a-glance summary of how your campaigns are doing

To really start to get to the underlying campaign and ad performance, you need to open the AdWords Campaign Summary window (shown in Figure 11-4).

Figure 11-4. The Campaign Summary window provides a great way to get a snapshot of your activity for any time period

Note

Some AdWords users prefer to set the Campaign Summary page as the first page that opens, rather than the Account Snapshot page. You can make this change by clicking the link on the bottom of either the Campaign Summary or Account Snapshot pages.

Understanding Your Campaign Summary

You can set the Campaign Summary window to display information for the current day or for almost any date range after the beginning of your AdWords account. Preset time periods besides the current day include the current week, the current month, and all time (i.e., since you opened your AdWords account).

Note

For the purpose of monitoring your AdWords performance, you should check the current day’s activity at least once a day before reviewing other time periods.

Here’s what the columns in the Campaign Summary window tell you about each of your campaigns:

Current Status: Campaign status can be Active, Paused, or Deleted. If a campaign is Active, ad groups within the campaign can be Paused. Paused campaigns are campaigns that are not running, but can be reactivated and set to Active. The number of Paused ad groups within a campaign will be displayed below the campaign’s status. Deleted campaigns cannot be reactivated. The historical data about Deleted campaigns is still present, so you can use this information for the purposes of analysis.
Current Budget: This is the daily amount you’ve budgeted for each campaign.
Clicks: The aggregate number of times ads within a campaign have been clicked.
Impr.: The aggregate number of impressions, or times the ads within a campaign have been displayed.
CTR: The click-through rate, or ratio of clicks to impressions, for a campaign.
Avg. CPC: The average cost per click for the ads in a campaign (for CPC-based ads).
Avg. CPM: The average cost per thousand impressions for CPM-based ads.
Cost: The total cost for all the ads in a campaign.
Conversion: Occurs when a click on your ad leads to an action, such as a purchase, signup, or lead.
View-through Conversion: Occurs when no content ad is clicked, but a conversion occurs within 30 days.

Drilling Down into a Campaign

To get more detailed information about a specific campaign, click the campaign in the Campaign Summary window. A summary window opens, as in Figure 11-5, showing each ad group within the campaign.

Figure 11-5. A summary of each ad group within the campaign is shown

Here’s the information shown for each ad group within a campaign (in each case for the time period selected):

Status: Ad group status can be Active, Paused, or Deleted.
Max CPC: The maximum amount you are willing to pay for content ads and specific targeted placements. (For CPM ads, this column is maximum CPM rather than CPC.) By default, Max CPC is broken down into the amount you are willing to pay for content ads (as opposed to search ads, which would be priced at the default) and specific, targeted placements.
Clicks: The aggregate number of times an ad has been clicked.
Impr.: The aggregate number of impressions, or times an ad has been displayed.
CTR: The click-through rate, or ratio of clicks to impressions, for a campaign.
Avg. CPC: The average cost per click for an ad (for CPC-based ads).
Avg. CPM: The average cost per thousand impressions for CPM-based ads.
Cost: The cost of the ad.
Avg. Pos.: The average position at which your ad is likely to be displayed when there is a keyword search match (see the sidebar ).

Note

For CPM ads, the Avg. Pos. column does not appear.

A conversion takes place when a sales prospect performs a specific action, such as making a purchase.

Conversions—represented by the Conversion Rate, Cost per Conversions, and Number of Conversions columns in the Campaign Summary page—depend on how you define a conversion. Conversion tracking is explained in Chapter 13.

Understanding Ad Group Performance

The real information about ad performance comes at the granular level of the ad group. To see performance of an individual ad group, click on the ad group in the summary for a particular campaign. A window will open displaying the ad contained by the ad group and showing keyword statistics for the ad, like the one shown in Figure 11-6.

The statistics for an ad group are roughly similar to those presented for individual campaigns and for the ad campaign summary, although the information is more granular (it applies to a specific group and not the entire campaign) and the relevant ad is also displayed.

Figure 11-6. The summary window for each ad group provides a detailed account of individual ad performance

Another important difference between the Ad Group Performance window and the less granular Campaign Summary performance window is that aggregate results are broken out by search versus content network.

Table 11-1. Keyword status labels and meanings

Keyword status label	Meaning
Normal	Targeted keywords are above Google’s minimum 0.5 percent CTR threshold; ads targeted to these keywords should display normally.
In trial	Keywords are below the minimum CTR threshold and under evaluation. Ads targeted to these keywords will continue to be served until Google is statistically confident that the keywords will deliver a CTR above or below the minimum—when the keyword will be moved to Normal or Disabled status, respectively. Each account has a limited (but unspecified) number of keywords that can be in trial at any one time.
On hold	An account’s In trial limit has been exceeded and a keyword is slightly below the minimum threshold. When In trial space becomes available, On hold keywords are automatically moved up to In trial status.
Disabled	Keywords don’t meet the minimum quality threshold (the 0.5 percent CTR) or haven’t triggered a click through in 90 days. If you really think a Disabled keyword is relevant to your ad, you can try turning the keyword into a descriptive phrase—for example, “yacht buying service” rather than “yacht.”