Chapter 13. Advanced Performance Monitoring

If you have only a handful of campaigns and ad groups to keep track of, the Campaign Summary window (shown in Chapter 10) should work fine. But once you are tracking a dozen or more campaigns, each containing multiple ads and many keywords, in order to retain your sanity—and do a good job of tracking your spending and performance with the multiple campaigns and ads—you’ll need to take advantage of the excellent AdWords reporting facility.

Conversion tracking means implementing a mechanism that tells you when visitors to your site perform a specified action. More specifically, if you are paying for advertising on a CPC basis, unless you are just interested in drawing eyeballs to your site, you’d probably like to know whether this traffic brings you revenue.

Using AdWords conversion tracking, you can add code to your web pages that lets you determine whether traffic generated by AdWords converts, that is, performs an action you want to have happen, such as making a purchase, leaving contact information, signing up for a subscription, or visiting a particular page.

This chapter explains how to use AdWords reports, and how to work with AdWords conversion tracking. I’ll also introduce Google Analytics and explain some of the sophisticated monitoring options available.

Using AdWords Reports

To create a report, click the Reports tab of the AdWords application. Click the Create Report link just under the tab to open the Create Report window, shown in Figure 13-1.

Figure 13-1. To create a report, select the button next to the kind of report you want to generate

Kinds of Reports

The first step in the Create Report window is to specify the kind of report you’d like to create. The available report types are:

Placement/Keyword: Provides performance information for all sites targeted and/or keywords across an entire account or in selected campaigns in an account.
Ad: Provides performance information for each of the ads in an account or in selected campaigns in an account.
URL: Provides performance information by destination URL for the ads in an account or in selected campaigns in an account.
Ad Group: Provides aggregate performance information for the Ad Groups in one or more campaigns in your account.
Campaign: Provides aggregate performance information for one or more campaigns in your account.
Account: Provides aggregate performance information for your account.
Demographic: Provides the demographic information that is available for an account.
Geographic: Sorts account information by geographic origin of users who received or clicked on your ads.
Search Query: Shows the search queries that triggered the display of your ad and led to clicks.
Placement: Shows performance data for Google content network (e.g., AdSense) sites where your ad has been shown.
Reach and Frequency: Reports on performance using reach (the number of people who have seen your ads) versus frequency (the number of times each viewer saw your ad).

Note

Creating all these reports works in more or less the same way, with minor differences in your ability to include specific kinds of data (or not). I’ll only show you the details of creating one kind of report, the Placement/Keyword report. But don’t worry—once you know how to create one of these reports, with minor variations in the information you choose to display, you really do know how to create all of them!

As an example, here’s how to create the first kind of report on the list, a Placement/Keyword report.

Creating a Placement/Keyword Report

To create a Placement/Keyword report, in the Create Report window choose the Placement/Keyword Report type. Next, in the Settings area, shown in Figure 13-2, choose a date range and which campaigns and groups you want to include in the report.

Figure 13-2. You can choose to display all campaigns and groups in the report or you can be more selective

Here’s a little more detail about the choices shown in Figure 13-2:

View (Unit of Time): You can choose to display data as an aggregated line of summarized information or as daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly data.
Date Range: You can choose a preset period to be covered by the report or select your own date range.
Campaigns and Ad Group: You can choose to display information for all campaigns in your account or for one or more campaigns.

The Advanced Settings window is not shown by default. To open this window, which allows you to customize your report with columns as shown in Figure 13-3, click the triangle to the left of Add or Remove Columns.

Figure 13-3. The default values for columns are shown in the Advanced Settings window

Using the Advanced Settings window, you can drill down to almost any level of detail. A good use for adding specific placements and keywords to the Level of Detail of an advanced report is to drill down into ads and keywords that you are specifically scrutinizing—because performance may be borderline acceptable, not terrible and not great.

Clicking the triangle to the left of Filter Your Results opens another window of advanced options, shown in Figure 13-4. The drop-down lists in the Filter Your Results window are useful if you are primarily interested in a single thing—for example, keywords that have high CTR.

Figure 13-4. You can filter your results—for example, you might want to show only keywords with a good CTR

In the final window of the account creation, shown in Figure 13-5, you can choose to save your report as a template, schedule your report, or email the completed report.

Figure 13-5. It’s easy to save a report as a template, schedule the report, or have the report emailed to you

It’s very convenient to schedule a report so that it is automatically run after a given amount of time has elapsed—for example, every day or once a week. The best part of this feature is that you can have the scheduled report automatically emailed to you. Scheduling reports and having them emailed to you means that the highlights of your AdWords activity will appear in your email inbox, so you don’t have to remember to login to AdWords to monitor your account.