Monday, April 20, 2015

New and refreshed reporting tools

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 announced a few months ago, Custom columns lets you customize the data and columns you see in your accounts. By selecting an existing metric, such as ‘CPC,’ and applying another segment such as ‘Mobile,’ you can quickly create a new custom column that lets you see ‘Mobile CPC’. With this new flexibility, Custom columns can help you save time and monitor the business metrics that matter most to you. Shaan Rupani from Dropbox tells us, “Custom columns have been a huge time-saver. Evaluating performance by conversion type, device, and network in columns instead of ad-hoc segmented reports will easily save us hours of work each month.” 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