It’s been a busy few months and there have been several changes to Google Adwords’ reporting options; not all receiving positive feedback from the Pay Per Click Management community.

The phasing out of the report centre with reports being added to the Account, Campaign & Keyword tabs provides some flexibility but only when quickly looking at top level data, making it much harder to run in-depth analysis needed for a successful PPC campaign.

Google has assured us that they are continuing to work on this and updates will be released over the next few weeks.

Another major development is the additional Adwords reports found in Google Analytics (GA).  This has been rolled out across Accounts over the last couple of months but not everyone knows about these or they aren’t reaping the benefits of the campaign insight available in these reports.

So I thought I’d share the top reports.

-        Where to find them?

Once logged into GA, navigate to the Traffic Sources and you will find an Adwords section with a wealth of reporting options. Previously you would have needed additional Google Conversion tracking and to manually pull the reports together but this is now all integrated in one place.

-        Top Reports

i.         Day Parting

Do you know the best day for sales volume? Are you wasting money across certain hours of the day? Well now you can find out!

Day part reporting allows you to view key metrics such as Sales, Revenue & the Bounce Rates of your campaign across the day. Drilling down further you can analyse which day of the week converts best versus which day generates a low ROI.

Using this data & implementing Adwords Ad Scheduling to your account can help your PPC campaign run more efficiently. Ad Scheduling allows you to set which days you automatically push & reduce the bids by a percentage or choose whether to run the ads at all.

Remember, there may be a period of the day which looks like it converts badly but take into account the Buying Cycle (Research, Compare, Purchase) as this could be the Research Phase and by reducing your bids then you may miss out on later conversions.

ii.       Search Queries

Using Keyword Match types effectively is a must for any successful PPC campaign. One of the key benefits of Broad Match is to help the reach of the campaign without having to bid on every single keyword permutation. This report shows what someone has actually typed into the search engine which you have broad-matched to. By adding the search queries that have converted into the account on Exact & Phrase Match, as well as expanding negatives for irrelevant queries, helps increase the account relevancy & reduce costs.

iii.      Placement reports

Similar to the Placement Performance Report in Adwords you can view which domains and pages your ads have been displayed on the Google Content Network but now more insight can be gained with the latest reports. You can now optimise by Sales, Time on Site & Bounce Rate increasing the ROI on your Content campaigns.

iv.     Keyword positions

Performance by Ad position has been a long running debate; is position 1 the best place to be? Does conversion rate differ by Ad position?

Well now you can find this out too! The keyword position report helps you analyse how each of your keywords perform based on the number of Visits, the number of Conversions, and engagement metrics like Bounce Rate and Time On Site by Ad position.

Stay tuned for next week when we share some of our learnings to find out how Ad position affects performance.

Until then, if you require any PPC advice or if you would like a free Adwords Account Audit please email ppc@bancmedia.com or call us on 0845 459 0558 .

Emma Crowe, PPC Manager

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Emma Crowe

Head of PPC at Banc Media

Emma is a time-served Pay Per Click optimisation expert. She has worked on many campaigns since 2007 across multiple sectors. Emma has full responsibility for all client PPC campaigns, ensuring that we meet campaign directives set by the client.

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