AdWords Report Training

 

Report Tutorial Video Transcription

 

Thank you for watching this report tutorial. This is an example report that will look somewhat similar to what you'll be receiving. This is an example of a law practice in Texas that's using AdWords.

Some of your metrics may vary, but you’ll find most things are going to be very similar.  After watching this video, if you do still have questions, please feel free to reach out to your support team with any questions that you have.

A couple things before we get started, you do want to think about your particular account and what your conversion types are; what you’re tracking for your favorable metrics such as phone calls, it could be purchases (if you're an e-commerce website), it could be lead generation, (if you are wanting people to fill out forms on your website).

Conversions are going to be the primary metric that we focus around so make sure that conversion tracking is set up. We may still be in process of getting your conversion tracking set up for your first report. Depending on what type of website you have, how your shopping cart is set up, and all those pieces.

Do keep in mind that it's critical that we have conversion tracking set up so that we can work properly with that. Now, if your conversion tracking is not implemented one other area that you can focus on is click through rate, along with clicks, as well as costs.

Those are going to be other good healthy metrics to look at and I’ll explain what those mean here in just a moment. Also make sure to note the dates on each section of the report. If you look up here we're looking at the last 30 days:

report date

There will be some sections that are going to be looking at the last three months. So, make sure you're looking at the date ranges, because different ranges are going to be relevant to different types of work that are taking place as we progress through your account.

3 month date range

Executive Summary
 

adwords executive summary

The executive summary is going to be a good place for you to get a 10,000 foot view of what's going on with your account each month. So, that's what we've included here in the top section. Now, you're going to see metrics such as impressions, cost, estimated total conversions, cost per estimated total conversions, clicks, and click through rate. What these mean, if you're not familiar:

Impressions

impressions

Every time your ad is served, Google counts that as an impression. That doesn't necessarily mean that there is an action taken. I mean the ad wasn't necessarily clicked on, but the ad was shown to a user. In a search result, essentially that means that your ad showed up but the user either didn't click on anything. Additionally, they could have clicked on an organic listing, or one of the competing ads.

We want to get an idea of how many times your ads are being shown because we can use that data in comparison to some of the other data that's going to help us out quite a bit.

Cost

cost

This is how much was spent in AdWords during the last 30 days. So, you want to make sure it matches up with whatever your budget is. We do fairly good at staying within plus or minus 5-10% of what your allotted budget is. Just make sure that we're on target to fulfill the target spend every 30 days.

Estimated total conversions

total conversions

This number is pulled directly from AdWords for whatever you’re tracking as conversions. This metric is what Google is reporting as your total conversions for that 30 day period.

COST / ETC

cost per conversion

Cost / ETC, which stands for ‘ cost per estimated total conversions,’ is simply the total cost divided by the total number of conversions.

Clicks

clicks

this is going to be how many times your ads were actually clicked on. So in relation to impressions in this particular example there were nearly thirty thousand impressions which netted us a little over a thousand clicks.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

click through rate

Click through rate is essentially clicks divided by impressions, and that's where we get that percentage. A good benchmark for Google is a minimum of 1% on a click through rate. If you're above 2% then you're doing really well. There are some industries that are a little bit more competitive, so click through rate can drop below that 1%, but typically we aim to be well above that 2% mark.

Now, also also on the executive summary, you'll notice that there is a smaller number below each of these metrics. This was the same data, but from the previous 30 days. If you notice in the title or the section header last 30 days compared to the previous 30 days, the smaller number below represents the previous 30 days.

conversion trend

So, we want to make sure that trends are going in the direction that are going to be most profitable for your business. The easiest way to dissect this is, is to take a look at whether your conversions are going up. In this scenario they've gone up substantially in the last 30 days (80.16% increase),  and the cost per conversion is going down (32.71% decrease). That is a good signal that you're getting a good ROI, so long as conversions are being tracked properly.

Conversion Type
 

So with the executive summary, I have mentioned conversion several times so I'm going to cover this part as well. Conversion type - every AdWords account is different, every business is different, and the priorities are going to be different for each and every one of our clients. Here, we have a total of 227 conversions during the last 30 days. This is showing what those conversions were during this reporting period. We have one conversion that is “Phone Call” - these are phone calls that are taking place on the website. We're using a call tracking software to track those users and bring that data into AdWords.

conversion type

Calls from ads, on the other hand, come from users that dial the phone number directly from the ad description or ad extension instead of clicking on the ad itself. There was only one of those conversions - obviously the majority of the focus is happening on on the website, so we get some good insight there.

So, again this is a great place if you’re in a hurry and just need a quick overview of how your AdWords account is doing. Take a look at your total conversions and your total cost per conversion. We may sometimes use the term CPA (which stands for cost per acquisition) instead of “cost / estimated total conversions,” That's the term that's used in AdWords. We may also refer to it as “cost per conversion” just make a simple, or you may see us in an email typing out “Cost/Conv.,” as an abbreviation as well.

Sessions by Channel
 

Even if you're only using AdWords with us, we're still going to show you how much traffic volume is coming from each of your three main channels (as long as we have access to Google Analytics): paid search, direct traffic and organic search.

sessions by channel

Paid search traffic is what’s going to be coming in from AdWords, unless we’re also doing Bing advertising. Direct traffic means somebody typed in your URL directly and came to the website. Organic traffic is going to be a user that typed in a keyword and clicked on an organic listing (non-paid search results) that showed up. A lot of these keywords are typically going to be branded terms, unless your site has had some SEO work.

So, this gives you a general idea of web traffic, but doesn't necessarily reflect the performance of your AdWords campaign. It also paints an overall picture as far as where the opportunities are in terms of competition and easy wins.
 

Cost vs. Conversion
 

In the cost versus conversion section, we're typically going to have two different sections here for you. One is going to be for the last 30 days, and other one will be for the last three months.

What we're looking at here is this blue line. If you look at the key here this line signifies costs, so how much was spent on any given day and how things are trending.

cost vs. conversions

The black line is the number of conversions, so the total volume of conversions for the days listed. You can see a lot of time these lines are going to correlate with each other, just keep in mind that the cost metrics are on the left side, and conversions metrics on the right side.

At the bottom you're going to see the listed reporting dates. You’ll notice in this example that there wasn't anything on the 6th or 7th, the 13th or 14th, and so on.

reporting date ranges

This client runs a law firm and they're not open on the weekends, so we don't run AdWords on the weekends. Make sure you take note that this isn't always going to show the 1st through the 30th or 31st of the month, this is going to be showing the days where either costs and conversions were recorded. If there was no activity that day, there won't be any spot for it on the graph.

The second graph, covering the last three months, is going to summarize the same data basically on a weekly basis. We include this so that you can evaluate our performance over time. What we want to see is conversions typically trending up over the last three months on average. We want to see the cost (that bluish colored line) trending down for the most part as well.

Now there are going to be ebbs and flows, so those trends are going to go up and down, but it's a lot easier to evaluate data when we have a larger data sample set. That's why we also look at the three-month trend as well.

If you’re new and conversion tracking wasn't properly implemented before, we’ve likely gone in and set it up properly. Your three-month average as well as your 30 day analysis can look a little bit off. Just be aware that this is tracking whatever we've told AdWords to count as a conversion during that time period. If conversions were removed, the trend will appear to be going down. If we've added conversions (such as phone tracking), the trend will appear to be going up.

So, just be aware of that, but this is a great way to evaluate how the ongoing performance is working in your account.

Campaign Performance
 

The campaign performance section is going to give you an overview as well as a breakdown of what's going on inside of each of your AdWords campaigns.
 

campaign performance summary

In this example, we have three different campaigns inside the account called “Atria New,” “Call-only,”and then the “Main” one that we've been working on for some time. This is going to give you a pie chart representation of what the conversion share is. In other words, where the majority of the conversions are coming from. Here, they’re coming from the “Main” campaign at 66% - the new campaign that we're testing for them is still getting some traction and accounted for a third of the conversions. Finally, we have a small “Call-only” campaign that's really not contributing too much, but it's still profitable so that's why we keep it going.

Below that, you'll be able to see the campaign performance breakdown.
 

campaign performance table

Budget is essentially the maximum allowed budget per day that we have allotted. So, we're trying to match up what your target monthly budget is, and share it across our multiple campaigns. That's why you see different budget amounts here, but again, the daily budget isn’t necessarily used up everyday. It’s what we're shooting for to make sure that we're using the entire budget effectively.

The metrics are similar to the executive summary - impressions, clicks, click-through rate - again it just breaks out the numbers for each campaign. So, you can quickly evaluate which ones have the best click through rate or the best campaign in terms of conversions. You can see the “Main” campaign is performing a little bit better than the new one, and Call-only campaign is not performing quite as strong as the others, but still acceptable.

Average CPC, this is something we haven't covered yet. CPC stands for “cost per click.” So, there's been eight hundred and twenty clicks in the main campaign and the average click price was $2.98.

Average position is where your ad is showing up relative to the other listings on the search results page. Position 1 is the top of the page, position 2 is the one below it, 3 is below that and so on. Typically, we don't aim for an average position of 1 because you pay a lot more for that. We can still get a good amount of traffic at a much cheaper price at position 2 or below.

The most important numbers are how much did we spend and how many conversions did we pick up. Our average cost per conversion is what really helps us to determine whether a campaign is profitable. If it's profitable, we want as many conversions as we can possibly get with the budget that you've given us. If we're hitting cost per conversion goals, but limited by our budgets, we're going to be asking if we can increase the budget (if it makes sense for your business and you have the ability to bring on more clients).

This is a great way for you to get an overview as to how your campaigns are doing, and of course you can always ask questions on different types of campaigns. We may have a multiple campaign types in there (display, shopping, search, remarketing, etc). This is a simplistic view to give you an idea of what you can expect and what you can look for.

Ad Group Performance

ad group performance summary

The Ad Group Performance Section is going to be a more granular view of the Campaign Performance section that we were looking at just before. This is going to be listing out top ad groups and conversion share based on those ad groups. The dominating group here is “Traffic Catch” and then they have other pieces inside of here as well. These will all be broken out so you'll be able to see the impressions, click-through rates, etc. Campaigns are going to contain multiple ad groups typically, and this gives us a more granular view of how performance is on the ad group level. So, same numbers and same metrics as the rest of the report for the most part.
 

Keyword Performance

top ten adwords keywords

Keyword Performance is going to be a breakdown of your top 10 keywords by conversions. Now keep in mind that there's a very good chance you'll have more keywords that are giving you additional conversions. For the simplicity of the report we keep it to the top 10. We can customize it as you request. We can have hundreds of top keywords if you want them in there. We want to make sure that we give you the most important data - the stuff that's really driving your business.

And so what you want to look at on here is going to show you the keyword, which campaign it belongs to, how many impressions, clicks, click through rate, average position, average CPC, first page CPC, and so on. These CPC estimates come from Google: first page is an estimate for page 1 prices, and top of page is how much it will cost to be in position 1.

cost per click comparison

For example, we're doing well because we have good quality scores on this particular keyword. We have an average position of 2.8 which would put it in the top of page CPC. We're achieving and average of $4.75, where Google estimates clicks should be at least $5.68. The first position is quite a bit more so that's why we're not necessarily focusing on the first position. We're still getting a great amount of conversions at an acceptable cost per conversion price based on what the client needs. This client  just needs to make sure that we're below $25 on our cost per conversion. And we are achieving that really well.

report conversions

This gives us a little bit of room there if they want to be a little bit more aggressive on their bidding for that term. That said, we always try to keep it as cheap as possible - we don't profit if you spend more in Google. We profit if you are making money on your business and you're getting clients. So, that's keyword performance.

Again, if you want to see a larger list, you can always jump into your AdWords account, click on the keywords tab, click on the conversions column and then sort by conversions. Or if you want to see this on a monthly basis just let your support team know and we can customize the report to include as many top keywords that you want. Again, do remember to take a look at the date range. Typically everything's going to be a 30 day date range.

Device Performance

device performance summary

Device performance can be an interesting section, just because everybody's making this huge shift from using desktop computers to primarily using mobile devices such as phones and tablets. This gives us a breakdown of where your traffic coming from. So, if you don't have a mobile-optimized website, this is going to be something that will be very helpful for you. If you do have a mobile-optimized website, this just gives you insight to how your site handles mobile traffic and how well mobile users convert. This also gives our team a break down some areas that we're always working through and optimizing.

The majority of the traffic for this particular example is coming from phones. These folks specialize in a traffic traffic tickets, injuries, and things like that. So, I could only imagine a lot of people would be doing this from their phones at work. Perhaps they're on their break looking up lawyers in the area after an accident or getting pulled over. The data is clear that that's where the majority of people are coming from.

device performance

Click-through rates are really strong on their mobile ads too. We are picking up the majority of the conversions there as well, and the cost per conversion is really reasonable. If you find that you don't have a lot of phone traffic, it's probably because we reduced bids on users who are using phones because your website is not mobile-optimized or not mobile friendly. Or maybe we've collected enough data showing that users just aren’t converting on mobile phones. So, that would be an area for you to talk to your web team about (as well as your support team here at Atria Media) to get an idea of what we can do to improve those numbers.

Questions?
 

Again, if you have questions please reach out to your support team. We’re happy to answer any specific questions you have. You can expect to get these reports on a biweekly or monthly basis depending on what service plan you’re on. We can always customize these though if you need reports on a different schedule. This is essentially the template that we use, and it works for the majority of our clients. Again, just keep in mind your data is going to be different. Your business is unique so there will be different keywords and different conversions. We always make sure to set up our reporting so that it aligns with your business and your goals.