Google has several features (free features) that are extremely useful in helping anyone optimize their AdWords campaign. Theses features should not be overlooked by anyone and a lot of times other guides recommend you purchase tools that do the exact same thing as Google’s free features.
Reports
I recommend watching the following video by Google that tells you how to create a report in Google AdWords:
Benefits of Google’s Reports
Everyone knows that the more information they know about something, the better. So why wouldn’t anyone want to know as much information about their advertising accounts as possible? This is why you use Google Reports. They will give you all of the information you need to know about your account, and you can even set the report to create itself and email it to you every few days without you having to do anything. Here are a few things you can set your report to do.
- List your most profitable keywords
- Tell you which campaigns are performing the best
- Help you find your quality score
- Inform you of invalid clicks
- Help you find unprofitable keywords in your account
- Compare your traffic/sales/cost reports over any time frame in graph form
- Tell you how many clicks you received
- List the number of sales you received from certain keywords/campaigns/AdGroups
How to Create A Report
Click on the reports tab (Number 10. on the AdWords map on the last few pages of this guide). From there you select “create a report”. You can choose how you want to see the report, which campaigns or add groups you want to view, and then you can view all of the information about the report either in text format, graph format, or both (I would recommend both).
Once you create the report, be prepared to wait a few minutes, the more information your researching the longer it will take to create the report.
There’s no limit of information that a Google report can display. I know this because I actually ran a one year report for all of my Google Accounts, which took about 15-20 minutes to complete, and Google told me my report was over 250 Megabytes in size and it was only available for download.
I recommend watching this video by Google about additional AdWords report features:
Fast Report Tip
Unfortunately, most people don’t take advantage of reports within their account. So below I will mention a good way to use Google reports to your advantage so you can better manage your Google AdWords account.
Quickly Finding Keywords to Delete – An important way to keep your account’s overall quality score history as high as possible is to remove/delete all of the keywords hurting your account. You should know which keywords these are, because I mentioned them in the Quality Score section. Here’s a quick way to find these keywords:
- Create a new keyword report for “Placement / Keyword Performance
- Set your report range to “Yesterday”
- Select “All campaigns and all their AdGroups”
- In the “Filter Your Results” section, check “Include Placements / Keywords with zero impressions”
- Run the report
The report above will display all of your keywords within your account. Once the report is completed, click on the column titled “Minimum CPC” to sort your keywords by their minimum bids displaying the highest bidded keywords first. Look through the keywords and make note of any new keywords that may have had their minimum bids raised by Google.
I usually run this type of report each day for the first three days or so when I create a new campaign. This way I know if I need to delete keywords that have the potential to hurt my account’s history. Incase you didn’t already know, your Minimum CPC bid is the same thing as your Quality Score.
Google Conversion Tracking
Tracking Google Sales
Google offers its advertisers a free service which will allow you to actually track the number of sales you receive per keyword for any time period specified. I would highly recommend this tool to anyone, because knowing this information is very valuable. If you know that a certain keyword is generating above average sales, you would want to raise the bid of that keyword so you can receive a higher rank, thus getting more traffic which leads to more sales. I have bids for some keywords where I pay about $0.25 to $0.55 per click. But I don’t lose money on those keywords because they generate above average sales.
Unfortunately, this tool requires two things that keep many people from using it. These two things are that you must own (or have the owners put a Source Code on their webpage for you, many online companies do this) the webpage you want to have conversion tracking on and you must enter the Google Conversion Tracking code into the HTML of your webpage. Some web pages with online affiliates advertise that they have Google Tracking available for all of their affiliates, but I have never tried this so I don’t know how accurate theirs are.
Surprisingly this tool is extremely accurate, especially when compared with other “free” sales tracking tools offered by other search engines. Usually when Google reports a sale, a sale has been made. Again, I would highly recommend this tool for anyone.
For more information about Google’s conversion tracking, I recommend watching the following video from Google.
Cross Channel Tracking
Tracking Other Search Engine Sales Using Google Tracking
Google also offers the same tracking feature for use on other search engines. This is called Cross-Channel Tracking. Basically when you sign up for this Google will give you a small piece of HTML to put on the sales page (also called a Thank You Page), they will also give you a new URL for each keyword you want to add to Cross-Channel Tracking. Once you have the individual URL(s) for your keywords, you will need to go to the other Search Engine and replace that keywords destination URL with the new URL Google gave you.
This is also a very accurate tool, although it is a bit of a pain to do this for in search engines where you have large keyword lists. I would only recommend adding this feature to keywords that you spend a lot of money on.
For more information about Cross-Channel conversion tracking, I recommend watching the following video from Google:
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