More new reports from Google Ads (AdWords)

Last month we looked at a number of new reports that have recently been added to the Google Ads (AdWords) reports centre. This month we review two additional reports that are now available which can help provide more detailed analysis of your PPC campaigns.

For those advertisers who use the content targeted option of Google Ads (AdWords) ‘ where adverts appear against relevant content pages on third-party websites – the new Placement Performance Report offers more transparency and detailed information on the performance of this sector, which was previously hard to analyse. This report shows which third-party content sites (and pages within the sites) generated the most impressions, clicks and also conversions, as long as there is tracking code in place.

This data therefore allows you to then exclude poor performing sites from your advertising coverage using the site exclusion tool, or to refine the keyword targeting and bid management across the AdGroups or Campaign. By identifying those sites that are performing well can encourage more activity with these domains, such as by using the site targeting where bidding is based on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM).

Google does urge caution when using this report and analyzing the data since content-targeted adverts tend to be less focused and the clickthrough rates will be significantly lower than through the main search advertising network, but at least advertisers can now see which other websites are generating traffic and conversions over a period of time and also see which other websites have been displaying their sponsored adverts.

The other recently added report is the Search Query Performance report, which shows performance data for the search queries that triggered the sponsored advert to be clicked by the searcher. This means that the queries shown in the report reflect what users have searched for, rather than just the keywords being used in the campaign. Therefore broad terms may trigger ads for a variety of different searches, other than the keywords specified.

Using this performance data, advertisers can identify additional terms that should perhaps be specifically targeted, or negative terms that need to be included. There are also general groups of terms shown to reduce the potential size of the report if unique queries generate only a very low volume of searches or if there are terms that don’t meet Google’s privacy requirements. Also, since this is a new report it only covers data from the beginning of May but it can provide a valuable insight into the search activity behind the top-line numbers.

These additional reports help to add a further depth of information within a Google Ads (AdWords) campaign and could be used to refine and develop a campaign through the use of data taken over a period of time. If you’d like to know more about these reports or would like to run these for your own PPC campaign, please contact us for more details.

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