The Google AdWords interface has seen a lot of changes recently. One of the more drastic of them has certainly been the gradual move of reporting from its own tab, to being consolidated into the Campaigns tab.
I was pretty concerned about the change after it was announced. After getting used to it, however, I think it is a great way to view important campaign data in your dashboard, without the need to navigate away from the Campaigns tab. In particular, the small Segment button, located underneath the Ad Groups and Settings tabs, gives a lot of important information that can be used to improve your campaign performance.
From the Campaigns tab, specify a data range before drilling down on the “Network” option from the Segment button. You’ll see a screen that looks like this:
You see results from Google Search, Search Partners and Display Network. From here, we can see that this campaign performed very strongly on Google search during August, but Search Partners drove disappointing results by comparison. If you notice this pattern persists over time, you might want to disable Search Partners altogether in favor of Google Search to deliver higher click-thru rates (CTR) or conversion rates.
Next, try segmenting your campaign by Click Type. You’ll get a screen that looks like this:
We waited for it for awhile, and now we finally see reporting metrics on ad extensions such as sitelinks and click-to-call. Not surprisingly, sitelinks CPC is drastically lower than the campaign average CPC, but it looks like these users are clicking on the main ad unit at a higher rate.
This particular client did not receive any phone calls from AdWords, however you might consider building mobile-specific campaigns for clients that do show large call volumes.
Finally, go ahead and segment your campaign by Device type. Your screen will look like this:
From here, you can see how your ads are performing not only on computers, but also on mobile phones. Anecdotally, I haven’t seen any patterns across verticals for mobile performance, so leverage this data to determine if you want to continue running mobile SEM on a client-by-client basis.
For clients with high mobile search volume, you’ll want to build a mobile-specific campaign to really optimize for ads, keywords and bids. High volume could also be a really strong indicator that you should be looking into other mobile initiatives such as dedicated mobiles sites, apps, or mobile display advertising.
These are just a few ideas on how to leverage Google’s new reporting interface, and I’m sure there are many, many more. We look forward to hearing your insights in the comments.
