Inside AdWords: Reporting

A new guide to great reporting in AdWords - Google Best Practices

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

We hope you’re excited as we are about last week’s launch of the Report Editor. This powerful new AdWords tool lets you explore your account data in brand new ways from within your browser.

On the heels of that update, you should also be sure to check out our brand new guide to AdWords reporting: Special Reports. Inside the guide you’ll find advice about how to surface the right insights in your account and how to turn those insights into action. Specifically, learn how to:

Frame analyses around what success looks like for you
Give analyses the appropriate context
Tell a story that translates reports into action
Tailor reports to be uniquely meaningful to your needs

There are plenty of example reports throughout that are intended to inspire you as you put together your own analyses. Whether you run those analyses via the Report Editor or via any of the other different ways to report on AdWords performance, find actionable insights through smart reporting. Happy analyzing.

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Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

View and analyze your data instantly with the new Report Editor

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Over the course of the next few months, we will be rolling out the Report Editor—a powerful AdWords tool that lets you explore your account data in brand new ways from within your browser.

Slice and dice your data in seconds

The Report Editor provides an easy-to-use interface that lets you build custom tables and charts that can be segmented, sorted, and filtered to help you find the insights that matter to your business.

With Report Editor, you can:

explore your data with simple drag and drop actions
sort, filter, and pivot your data to focus on the slices of information you need
visualize your data in pie, bar, or line charts to reveal powerful insights
apply multiple segmentations to analyze your data with finer granularity

Getting started with the Report Editor is easy. For example, to examine performance across devices, simply drag and drop the metrics and dimensions you like into your table or chart. You can look at metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions, and then add dimensions like device, campaign, or ad group to segment your data further.

Visualize your data for more powerful insights

Visualizing data in a chart can make your data more actionable. Charts can quickly unveil performance trends that may be missed when looking at numbers alone. Now, you can instantly create a line, pie, or bar chart to surface your key insights. Want to try a different visualization? It just takes a click to instantly switch between different charts and tables. Just like tables, you can save and share your charts with others or set them to run regularly.

Advertisers who have tried the Report Editor are already benefitting from the tool’s flexibility and speed. Eve Denton, Senior Account Manager at Metric Theory tells us, “The Report Editor lets me instantly analyze performance data for mobile, search, and location. I can also manipulate my report at the drop of a hat—all I need to do is drag and drop. Having the ability to quickly alter the date range I'm viewing rather than re-downloading and re-pivoting has vastly decreased the amount of time I spend creating reports.”

Getting started

We are rolling out access to the Report Editor over the next few months. You’ll know you have access when you see the new Reports tab in your account. From the Reports tab, you can open a pre-defined report or create your own report from scratch.

Check out the new AdWords Help Center for more details on how to use Report Editor. Stay tuned for future updates that will let you add even more data to the Report Editor.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Group Product Manager, Google AdWords

New and refreshed reporting tools

Monday, April 20, 2015

Spring is here, and it’s a great time to set your sights on creating new marketing goals and ensuring that your campaigns are set up for success. You now have access to new and improved reporting tools that will help you identify opportunities in your account, track the right metrics, and find deeper insights that might help you improve performance.

Read on to find out how you can put these tools to work in your campaigns this year.

Campaign details reports provide a faster, easier way to see which features and settings are enabled in each of your campaigns.

Custom Columns let you create and view segmented columns for the metrics you care about most in your account.

Top Movers Report improvements help you identify significant performance changes in your campaigns and ad groups so you can take action to optimize your account.

1. Check your settings and close easy gaps

Understanding the status of your settings is an important part of ensuring that your campaigns are set up for success. Consider the impact, for example, if your campaigns were accidentally missing mobile bid modifiers? With the new campaign details report you can quickly see settings that aren’t being utilized and identify opportunities for improvement across your account or MCC.

With the new reports, you can:

Quickly find inconsistent settings that could be limiting performance
Identify settings that you aren’t yet utilizing
View details alongside your performance metrics to get a more comprehensive look at account performance

Let’s say you want to improve CTR across your text ads by adding sitelinks to all of your campaigns. Previously, you would have individually looked at the ad extensions tab for each campaign to check the status of your sitelinks. For a hundred campaigns, this task could take a couple hours to complete. Using the campaign details report, you can see all of the campaigns that currently have active or disapproved sitelinks in just a few minutes. Now, you can spend less time searching for your settings and more time activating opportunities that might improve performance.

Find settings and opportunities on the "Campaigns" tab

2. Analyze for deeper insights

As we Learn more.

3. Keep tabs on your performance

The Top Movers report helps you identify the campaigns and ad groups that have changed the most over a specific period of time and helps you identify possible causes.

In the last few weeks, we’ve made some improvements to the report. You will notice a new, simplified interface that makes it easier to spot significant changes across your account and quickly take action on developing trends. For example, the summary table at the top has been distilled to show key changes in your top movers metrics for the date range you set. And, you can scroll down to see the campaigns and ad groups that have changed the most for cost, clicks, and conversions so you can quickly take action to improve performance. Learn more.

Use the Top movers report to find significant changes across your account

Getting started

We hope these three tools help you more easily monitor performance, view actionable insights, and quickly identify opportunities to improve performance. To learn more about these and other reporting tools designed to help you monitor and measure the success of your campaigns at scale, check out our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Group Product Manager, AdWords

Easier reporting for multiple campaign types

Thursday, April 09, 2015

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out three new features to help multi-channel advertisers more easily manage their reporting and find the insights that matter most to them.

For advertisers with multiple types of campaigns and advertising goals, reporting can be a tedious and time-consuming task. For example, to report on specific goals related to your Search, Display or Shopping Network campaigns, you may find yourself filtering for your campaign type, and re-adjusting your columns several times to view the information you need.

With these three new reporting features, you’ll now be able to easily

Filter your account by campaign type
See more relevant columns more quickly
Apply column sets based on your advertising goals

Easily filter your account by campaign type

The new campaign type selector lets you quickly filter your account by campaign type, so you can see results for just your Search, Display or Shopping Network campaigns. For example, if you’re reporting on Display Network performance, you can quickly see all ad groups in your Display campaigns with one simple step.

Easily filter for the campaign types you want to view

See more relevant columns based on campaign type

Are you tired of constantly switching columns when you go from reporting on Search Network campaigns to reporting on Display Network campaigns? Now, your last viewed columns, which previously have only been stored by tab - like campaign, ad group or keywords - will be stored by both tab and campaign type.

Let’s say you're on the Ad groups tab looking at the Clicks and Avg. CPC columns for a Search campaign. Then, you look at the ad groups in a Display campaign and adjust your columns to see Impressions and Avg. CPM. Now, when you look at the Ad groups tab for Search campaigns, you’ll see columns for Clicks and Avg. CPC. But when you switch to Display Network campaigns, you’ll see Impressions and Avg. CPM. This lets you quickly see more relevant columns based on your campaign type.

Quickly apply column sets based on your advertising goals

To make it faster and easier to view data for specific advertising goals, we’re introducing pre-defined column sets. These column sets help you quickly load up reporting columns that are tailored to different advertising goals. For example, you may have multiple Display campaigns, some that are focused on branding goals, and others that are focused on performance goals. With pre-defined column sets, you can easily switch your reporting view to see columns specific to each of these advertising goals. And, you can always get back to your last column selection by choosing Custom from the "Columns" drop-down menu.

Pre-defined column sets help you find insights for Branding or Conversion Goals

Next steps

These reporting improvements will be rolled out over the next few weeks to advertisers with more than one type of campaign in their account. To learn how you can start using them in your daily reporting, check out our Help Center.

Posted by Pallavi Naresh, Product Manager, AdWords

Measure & Optimize for Offline Sales with AdWords Conversion Import

Thursday, September 05, 2013

Potential buyers have increasingly turned to the web as the first step in their purchase decisions. So for years, digital marketers in insurance, auto sales, and other high consideration industries have been using AdWords to build awareness and generate leads. These leads have been handed to sales reps, who then help customers complete the purchase process.

In AdWords, you’ve been able to see which keywords lead to higher or lower lead volumes, and to optimize for a cost per lead goal. But there's been no easy way to measure and optimize in AdWords for events that happen beyond the website, like a customer order taken over the phone by your sales team.

New Conversion Import Feature

The new AdWords conversion import feature can help you measure and optimize for the complete end-to-end purchase process. Now you can upload your offline conversion events into AdWords and see how clicks on your ads led to sales made in the offline world such as over the phone or via a sales rep.

Click image to enlarge

And since your offline conversion events will be incorporated into your existing AdWords conversion data, tools such as Flexible bid strategies can leverage that data.

How you might use the conversion import feature

Let’s see how importing conversions can help a small business measure and optimize for the entire customer journey, from online leads to offline sales.

Isabelle designs, builds and sells high-end custom furniture. She uses AdWords to drive prospective customers to her website, where they can submit their contact information and request a sales call. AdWords Conversion Tracking can measure these raw lead submissions, but since most of them won’t result in a sale, she optimizes her campaigns on raw submitted leads; not actual sales.

Now that she’s able to import her offline conversion data (including sale value), Isabelle can better understand which keywords drive the most profitable sales. With a more accurate ROI picture, Isabelle can better manage her bids and budget.

How to get started

For step by step directions to get started, check out this article on how to import your offline conversions.

Several software solution providers, including Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud.

More to come

As we mentioned last week, with the launch of cross-account conversion tracking and Search Funnels, we’re working on tools like the conversion import feature to help you measure your customer’s complex path to purchase.

Our product roadmap has lots of improvements and new features aimed at providing a more complete picture of your customers' journey and more accurate measure of ads effectiveness across devices and across channels. Stay tuned!

Posted by Jon Diorio, Product Management Lead, AdWords Reporting & Insights

Analyze and optimize your search footprint with the new paid & organic report

Thursday, August 22, 2013

One of our goals is to provide tools to help you better understand how people searching on Google are connecting with your business. That’s why we provide reports like the impression share reports.

Today, we’re announcing the addition of the paid & organic report in AdWords, a new report to help you analyze and optimize your search footprint on Google. Previously, most search reports showed paid and organic performance separately, without any insights on user behavior when they overlap. The new paid & organic report is the first to let you see and compare your performance for a query when you have either an ad, an organic listing, or both appearing on the search results page.

Click here to enlarge

Here are some ways you can use the paid & organic report to measure and optimize your search performance:

Discover additional keywords. Use the report to discover potential keywords to add to your AdWords accounts by looking for queries where you only appear in organic search with no associated ads.
Optimize presence on high value queries. Use the report to improve your presence in paid results and monitor your high value queries for organic results.
Measure changes holistically. As you test website improvements or AdWords changes to bids, budgets, or keywords, you can more easily report the impact across paid, organic, and combined traffic.

Getting started
To get started, you’ll need to link your AdWords account to a Webmaster Tools account. Linking requires you to be a help center.

We hope the new paid & organic report saves you time and helps you improve your performance as you're managing both types of search traffic for your business.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Product Manager, AdWords

Easily compare your ad performance over time

Monday, August 05, 2013

Which campaigns are down this week? How is my performance this month compared to last month? If you’re like most advertisers, you ask yourself these questions on a regular basis. Over the next few days, we’re rolling out a feature that makes it much easier compare metrics across different time periods by putting the data right in your AdWords tables.

Once “compare dates” is enabled in your date selector, you’ll see a new + button at the top of many columns. Click the + above Clicks, for example, and the Clicks column expands to show you this week’s Clicks, last week’s Clicks, the absolute change and the percent change.

Click to enlarge

This new functionality has been added to many reports across AdWords, on most metrics. All of the additional columns are also sortable and filterable, which makes it easy to answer questions like:

Which campaigns saw the largest increase in clicks?
Which ad groups saw conversions drop by more than 20%
Which keywords saw an increase of at least 100 clicks?

You can also use filters on these columns. This makes it easy, for example, to create a saved filter which finds all campaigns that saw a decrease in clicks of 20% or more:

Click to enlarge

For more details on how to view, sort, and filter on time comparison data, visit our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by David Rodriguez, Product Manager, AdWords

Improving AdWords Quality Score Reporting

Friday, July 26, 2013

As part of our ongoing efforts to help improve the quality of our ads, we're announcing an update that changes how each keyword’s 1-10 numeric landing page experience. We expect this update to reach all advertisers globally within the next several days.

We're making this change so that the Quality Score in your reports more closely reflects the factors that influence the visibility and expected performance of your ads. We hope that providing you more transparency into your 1-10 Quality Score will help you improve the quality of your ads.

Please note that this is only a change to how a keyword’s 1-10 Quality Score is reported. It does not change how Quality Score is calculated in real-time for each auction, and thus won't have any direct effect on your ad performance. So unless you have automated rules tied directly to your reported 1-10 Quality Score, your ads should continue to behave as they did before.

We believe this improvement will make it easier for you to take specific action to improve your ads and to recognize when your changes are working. Our goal in making this update is to provide you with a better understanding of your Quality Score to help you run a more effective AdWords campaign.

More on Quality Score
To review the basics of Quality Score, please see our help center article on 10 things you should know about Ads Quality, which addresses frequent questions and common misconceptions on Quality Score and other external factors that influence the performance of your ads.

Posted by Jen Huang, AdWords Product Manager

New top movers report to track how your ad performance has changed

Monday, June 24, 2013

Many of you start each day by asking: What is driving a change in my clicks or cost? What campaigns or ad groups saw the the largest moves? Did any of my recent changes break something?

To help answer these questions, we’ve created the top movers report to show you which campaigns and ad groups have experienced the largest changes in clicks and cost, and highlight changes you made which might have contributed to those moves. Even if your overall account performance metrics appear unchanged, the top movers report will look inside your campaigns to highlight big moves that might have been easily overlooked.

How it works
To view the top movers report, click the Dimensions tab, then View: Top movers. The report compares performance for two consecutive time periods of equal length, and finds the campaigns and ad groups that experienced the largest change between the two periods. You can compare periods of 7, 14, or 28 days, or look at reports generated in the last 90 days.

The report will start by finding up to 10 of the largest moves in clicks or cost and present a summary at the top. If a top mover saw an increase, it goes into the “Top increases” category. If it’s a decrease, it goes into the “top decreases” category. When changes aren’t significant enough to be a top mover, they will roll up into “Other changes.”

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The table below will give details for each top mover. When possible, we offer a “possible cause” for the move, like “bids were increased” or “new keywords were added”.

Click here to enlarge

Note that “possible causes” only considers changes made to your account. It won’t tell you, for example, if your competitors have raised their bids or introduced new ads.

Top movers is our latest effort to save you time and money by helping you understand changes in performance. For additional information about using this new report, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by David Rodriguez, Product Manager, AdWords

New ways to see how you stack up against the competition with Auction insights

Monday, June 10, 2013

The Auction insights report gives you valuable insight into how your ad performance compares with that of other advertisers. For example, based on the impressions you’re eligible for, you can see how often your competitors’ ads are appearing above yours or whether one of your competitors has a higher impression share than you on an important keyword.

Before today, you could only get this data one keyword at a time - making it hard to see the bigger picture of where you stand relative to your top competitors. Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve added some exciting new functionality to the Auction insights report that will make it easier for you to get a bird’s eye view of your competitive landscape.

Click here to enlarge

Now, in addition to running an Auction insights report on a single keyword you can also run a report on any of the following scenarios:

Groups of keywords. For example, you may want to run a report on all keywords that contain a certain brand term, or that have the same label. Simply filter your keyword list, select the keywords you want to include, and run an Auction insights report on the selected terms to see how your performance on those terms compares to that of your top competitors.
Individual or multiple ad groups. You’ve probably already arranged your keywords into meaningful groupings within ad groups. For example, if you sell men’s wear, you may have an ad group for “Father’s Day gifts” with keywords all about Father’s Day. Now, from the ad groups tab, you can select one or more ad groups to run an Auction insights report. This will show you how your performance on all eligible keywords within those ad groups compares to advertisers who most commonly compete with you on those terms.
Individual or multiple campaigns. Sometimes you may be interested in a high level picture of who’s competing with you across a wide range of topics. In those instances, you can select one or more campaigns from the campaigns tab, and run an Auction insights report there to see how the competitive landscape looks at that high level.

We hope that these new features provide you additional insights to help you optimize your campaigns more efficiently. We are rolling this feature out today and you should expect to see it in your account within the next few hours.

For more information on how to run an Auction insights report, how to interpret your data, or create a filter, visit the Hangout on Air Tuesday, June 25th at 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST where we will cover a few of the great things you can do with the new functionality in this report.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Product Manager, AdWords

The new Display Benchmarks Tool: put context around your display campaigns

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Imagine: you’ve built a beautiful digital marketing campaign and it’s finally live. You get your reports back with a list of data points and while the numbers seem good, it’s pretty hard to understand them without any reference points. That’s the crutch: data doesn’t take on meaning when it’s just floating around in the ether; you need to build context around your data and anchor it to other relevant data points to better understand what your own numbers mean.

Industry benchmarks -- reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry -- give you these comparisons. And today, for the first time, we’re launching the Display Benchmarks Tool, an easy-to-use webpage that lets you pull benchmarks to help you make better decisions about your campaigns.

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Whether you're after comparisons by country, industry vertical, ad size or ad format, our tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions. Here’s a quick demo of how to pull the benchmarks.

We've been playing around with the tool and identified some interesting trends around user engagement in our industry. Here's a bit of what we've seen:

Trend #1 User choice leads to more engagement: People want to choose how and when they consume content online. We’re starting to see new ad formats, such as the Engagement formats, that let people choose whether to watch or skip an ad. Our benchmark data shows that people are increasingly choosing to interact with these ads. Video completion rates are the highest we’ve ever seen, with people completing 60% of the videos that they watch.

Trend #2: Richer ads lead to more engagement: Longer interaction also stems from more beautiful and compelling ads, which advertisers are increasingly incorporating in their campaigns. Interactive video ads, such as this Skyfall ad, let viewers turn their mobile phones and tablets into controllers that dictate what happens within the content on their desktop. These ads represent the new creative formats that are closing the gap between advertising and awesome content. And we’re seeing the results: since last summer, people are interacting with rich media ads ~50-60% more frequently and spending ~20% more time interacting.

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Trend #3: Optimize your campaigns for engagement: Advertisers used to rely solely on click-through rates and reach/frequency reports to measure their campaigns. Now, these new rich media formats provide a better set of metrics, which help advertisers understand what’s best for users and optimize their campaigns. For example, from the benchmarks tool we’ve learned that interaction rates correlate strongly with larger ad area - the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. Similarly, we’ve learned that rich media expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for getting people to interact for longer amounts of time. These types of insights are instrumental in making improvements to an advertiser’s campaign.

These findings confirm what we've heard from our partners -- as ads become more engaging and relevant to users, their performance improves. If you’re still hungry for more data, don’t worry -- next Tuesday, we’ll be kicking off a “Data Insights Blog Series,” where we’ll deep-dive into one trend a week and explain how the insights apply to your campaigns.

As you check out the tool for yourself, let us know if you find any nuggets you think we’ve missed. We just might feature your insight in one of our blog posts.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

Enhancing AdWords for a constantly connected world

Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Today we’re upgrading AdWords, by rolling out enhanced campaigns. This is a first step to help you more simply and smartly manage your ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world.

Why enhanced campaigns?
People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, a recent study of multi-device consumers found that 90% move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task. There’s also a proliferation of new devices — PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, hybrid devices, mini-tablets, televisions, and more. And there are many more digital screens and devices to come, with the lines between them continuing to blur. For example, as devices converge, consumer behaviors on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar.

This creates great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad.

With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place. Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.

Key features
Here’s an overview of some key features.

Powerful marketing tools for the multi-device world
People want search results that are relevant for the context they are in — their device, location and the time of day. Enhanced campaigns help you better manage your campaigns and budgets for this multi-device world. With bid adjustments, you can manage bids for your ads across devices, locations, time of day and more — all from a single campaign.

Example: A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for "coffee" or "breakfast" on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.
Smarter ads optimized for varying user contexts
People on the go or near your store may be looking for different things than someone sitting at their desk. With enhanced campaigns, you’ll show ads across devices with the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without having to edit each campaign for every possible combination of devices, location and time of day.

Example: A national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC — all within a single campaign.
Advanced reports to measure new conversion types
Technology is enabling people to take action on your ads in new ways. Potential customers may see your ad and download your app, or they may call you. It’s been hard for marketers to easily measure and compare these interactions. To help you measure the full value of your campaigns, enhanced campaigns enables you to easily count calls and app downloads as conversions in your AdWords reports.

Example: You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads.

Upgrading to enhanced campaigns
Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option over the next few weeks, and we plan to upgrade all campaigns in mid-2013.

Enhanced campaigns are designed to help you succeed in a multi-screen world, but we know that transitioning may involve some initial changes. Here are some resources to help you:

Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the new features with tips and best practices on the Inside AdWords blog and on our Google+ page. We’d love your feedback.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering

Legacy impression share columns to be retired next week

Monday, January 28, 2013

On November 7th we rolled out several improvements and changes for AdWords impression share (IS) reporting. As we mentioned in that initial roll, we’re continuing with our plans to phase out the old IS columns on February 4th.

Any saved reports using the old IS columns will need to be updated to use the new columns. If you don’t remove/replace those columns before they’re retired on February 4th, you won’t be able to run those saved reports.

Upgrading to the new, network-specific columns comes with a number of improvements including:

Distinct search and display columns. We’ve added new columns to cleanly separate search and display impression share.
“Hour of day” segmentation. We’ve enabled “Hour of day” segmentation so you can evaluate how your ad coverage varies by the hour.
Filters, charts and rules. With the new IS columns you can apply filters, see charts, and apply automated rules using IS metrics.
Device segmentation. Starting today you can also segment your IS columns by device so you can see coverage for desktop, mobile and tablet devices separately.

For more information on what’s changing and what you may need to do, visit our AdWords help center, which has additional details.

Posted by Rob Newton, Product Marketing Manager

New column makes keyword management easier

Monday, December 17, 2012

We recently launched a new AdWords Community explain why the column is an important part of a healthy AdWords diet.

What’s so special about this new column?

Calin: You can now see in one simple table which keyword matches which search terms, for all the keywords in an ad group, campaign, or even the whole account, and you can act accordingly. It's cool, it saves time, it’s zero calories and it’s good for your health.

Moshe: Finally, there’s no need to guess which keyword triggers an ad.

What were your first thoughts when you heard the column was available?

Calin: For the first time, I can stay within AdWords and decide whether I should delete or pause a keyword altogether, or keep it and use some negative keywords to block unwanted impressions for irrelevant search queries. In the past I had to resort to the Analytics API to achieve the same effect. That’s no longer the case, because we now have access to a lot more information right in the AdWords interface.

How does it change the search terms report?

Moshe: Now the report is much more transparent. A campaign manager can see, at one glance, the complete funnel that triggered an ad: the original search term a user was searching for, through the keyword that matched the search term, and finally the ad group of the ad shown, all on the same page.

Calin: You no longer have to guess which keyword matched which search terms if you’re looking at more than one keyword. Previously, you could select one keyword at a time, and see the search terms that it matched. Now you can look at a whole ad group, campaign or account, see all the search terms that have caused your ads to show during a certain period of time, and right next to them, which keyword is "responsible" for a particular search term.

And finally, what do you hope to see from AdWords reporting in the future?

Calin: It could be great if we could import the Google Analytics metrics in the Keywords tab into the search terms report. Even if a search term doesn’t convert directly, if it leads to visits where one can see a large number of pages per visit or a low bounce rate, it may prove useful. In the absence of those metrics, we can only judge the search queries in terms of conversions.

Moshe: I am a great fan of the 80/20 Pareto principle: “You can draw roughly 80% of the conclusions from 20% of the data.” I have as much data as I need to run effective campaigns. As Calin suggested, a better integration of presenting data from both Analytics and Adwords in a “unified report” could be helpful.

Discuss the new column in the search terms report article in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Cindy Meyers and Virginia Roman, Editors, Online Help

Impression share reporting changes coming soon

Monday, October 01, 2012

impression share (IS) reportingWhat’s new

Distinct search and display columns. We’re adding new columns to cleanly separate search and display impression share.

“Hour of day” segmentation. Based on your feedback, we’re enabling “Hour of day” segmentation so you can evaluate how your ad coverage varies by the hour.

Filters, charts and rules. You’ll be able to create automated rules using IS metrics.

Accuracy. We’re improving the accuracy of how we calculate impression share data.

Changes to existing columns and historical IS data

Milestone

Existing IS Columns

New IS Columns

Early November 2012

Historical IS data in existing columns will only be available going back to October 1, 2012

New IS columns appear for the first time with historical IS data available going back to October 1, 2012

February 2013

Existing IS columns and data permanently retired

Historical IS data available in new IS columns back to October 1, 2012

Preserving pre-October 2012 historical IS dataTo preserve an offline copy of your pre-October historical IS data with the existing columns, you must download all desired reports before the start of November 2012. After early November you’ll only have historical IS data for the existing columns going back to October 1, 2012.contact AdWords supportPosted Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

Digital marketing made (much) easier: Introducing Google Tag Manager

Monday, October 01, 2012

(Cross posted from the Analytics Blog)

Over the past few years, we’ve seen massive improvements in digital marketing sophistication and capabilities. Today there’s a rich suite of tools allowing marketers to gain better insights, reach audiences in new ways, and develop improved marketing campaigns so users have better web experiences. Yet many modern marketing tools—like web analytics, conversion tracking, remarketing, and more—depend on adding "tags" to your website.

Website tags help enable today’s sophisticated digital marketing technologies

Tags are tiny bits of website code can help provide useful insights, but they can also cause challenges. Too many tags can make sites slow and clunky; incorrectly applied tags can distort your measurement; and it can be time-consuming for the IT department or webmaster team to add new tags—leading to lost time, lost data, and lost conversions.

We’ve been hard at work to help take the pain out of tagging for everyone. That’s why today, we’re announcing our first release of Google Tag Manager. We’re launching globally in English, and the product will soon be available in many other languages.

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface. You can add and update your own tags, with just a few clicks, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks or rewriting site code. It gives marketers greater flexibility, and lets webmasters focus on other important tasks. Take a quick look at how easy it is to set up an account and manage your tags:

Google Tag Manager is built to handle your tagging needs, and it works with Google and non-Google website tags. We’ve packed in lots of great features, including:

We’re also happy to announce our tag vendor program: If your company provides tag technology and you’d like Google Tag Manager to include a template for your tag, please contact us here to become a tag vendor.

Dozens of companies have already begun using Google Tag Manager and have seen great results. Ameet Arurkar, Director of Search Engine Marketing at QuinStreet, reports:

“Google Tag Manager took one big chunk of time out of the tagging process. What took 2 weeks now takes less than a day—sometimes just hours. We, the campaign managers, now make the call on which tags to use, and we can implement the tags ourselves.”

“Google Tag Manager just makes business sense. Why would we want to manually add hundreds of tags for our pages?”

Setting up Google Tag Manager is quick and easy—you create an account, add one snippet of code to your site, then start managing tags. If you want more help, contact a Google Certified Partner—they’ve been carefully vetted and meet rigorous qualification standards.

Get started today at www.google.com/tagmanager.

Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

An easier way to view advertising policies

Wednesday, August 08, 2012

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Approval status for each ad

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Specific policies that can limit where your ads show

Posted by Katie Miller, Google Ads Team

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Tuesday, May 22, 2012

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