Google Adwords Reporting

My dictionary defines reporting as presenting an often official, formal, or regular account.

Most people define reporting as something that you have to do once a week because your line manager tells you to.

Reporting can be a nuisance, but it’s valuable. A report can tell you what’s working on your campaign, and what isn’t. It can help you focus your attention on the important things in your campaign.

So what should you report?

Personally, I produce weekly and monthly reports for each campaign that I manage. Each one has the overall performance of the campaign over time, and the performance of each adgroup.

I report on the number of impressions, the number of clicks, the cost, the number of conversions, the click through rate, the conversion rate, the cost per click and the cost per conversion.

It’s probably worth splitting out the Search Network and Content Network as well.

Impressions

Has the total number of people searching for whatever it is that you do fallen? If so, then it’ll probably have a knock-on effect on your clicks and conversions. This is quite important with seasonal products, where you have a relatively short period in which to make the majority of your sales. Also, if you’ve reduced your bids, then this could fall if some of your adverts drop from page one to page two.

Click through Rate And Cost Per Click

These two factors are clearly linked. Even if you haven’t changed your bids, changes by your competitors can impact your cost per click and your advert position (and hence your click through rate). If your advert testing is working well, then over time your click through rate should improve over time, though in the short term it can fall if you test something that doesn’t work.

Cost

Are you spending your full daily budget? If it’s being spent every day, or almost every day, then you are bidding too much for your keywords, since your advert isn’t showing all day. If your daily budget is causing you to turn away profitable traffic, and as a result you’ve been cutting your bids, then you need to keep a close eye that you don’t spend too much less than your budget.

Ideally, your budget will just run out at the end of the day - if you’ve got spare money, you’ve not been bidding enough, if it runs out, you’re bidding too much (assuming that your traffic is profitable).

Cost Per Conversion

This is the closest that Google will get to showing you how profitable your campaign is. You want to minimise this without reducing the traffic that you’re getting.

If an Adgroup or Keyword has a very poor cost per conversion over a period of time, you should either reduce your bids or stop the Keyword altogether.

Why Bother?

Reporting gives you a sense of where your campaign’s coming from. If your cost per conversion had been running at £50, then it suddenly drops to £20 for a few weeks, before creeping back up to £30, then a good report will tell you that things are still going quite well. There are many reasons for a ˜blip’ like this, but unless you know what sort of figures you’ve been getting historically, you don’t have any sense of perspective.

How?

Just click on the tab entitled œReporting. Personally, I set up a report that automatically e-mails me the data for the last week, and I add the data to a spreadsheet, and draw some graphs and tables and things.

Page last updated by Steve Baker on May 11, 2008 at 7:10 pm.

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