The types of reports offered by Google Adwords are useful for various purposes. The report types are self-explanatory and I am not going to explain them in detail. The following is what you will see when you select the option to create new reports. I will provide some tips to use the reports offered by Google Adwords and derive more efficiently out of your Pay per click campaigns.
One
You can have so many types of reports generated with various combinations of metrics chosen from the options section. But you need to know what is it you want to achieve with the reports. The best way to address this issue is to identify
- What your Google Adwords Pay per click campaign objectives are. Use the objectives to identify which reports you should be looking at.
- Prioritize which reports should be looked at more often than other reports, so you don’t waste time.
- Analyze data at the keyword level and then move to the ad group and campaign level. Though you might be aware of it, many are not.
Two
Google Adwords doesn’t provide the ROI data for keywords in the Adwords interface. But you can get the ROI data by selecting the Conversion Value / Cost metric from the advanced settings option. Check the below image.
This metric is actually the ROI, which is the revenue divided by the actual cost incurred to get that specific conversion.
[ROI = Revenues / Cost]
Use this metric to determine whether you are profitable spending more money on certain keywords, how much should you bid for the converting keywords and optimize your Google Adwords Pay per click campaigns and drive results.
Three
AdGroup performance and Campaign performance reports provide data by the hour (with or without a date) and days, which can be used for Ad scheduling (also known as Dayparting).
Use these reports to determine when your campaigns are actually performing better in terms of your campaign objectives, which times of the day/week do you get more searches, when is it not a good time to run your campaigns, etc. Based on this analysis you can schedule your campaigns to run at specific times of the day, get more conversions, and spend less money.
For more details: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33227
Four
Search Query Performance report shows the actual queries typed by visitors to reach your website, which you don’t have in your Google Adwords account. Use this report to identify new keywords that you should be advertising for as well as negative keywords. The only negative aspect of this report is it doesn’t show the actual keyword from your Adwords account that lead to your ads being triggered for Broad or Phrase match. Also, understand the match types in the report properly.
Five
Google Adwords allows you to customize and create your own reports. You can save the customized reports and run them when you need it. Even better, you can actually schedule these reports to run at certain time intervals, be it days/months, and have them delivered to your inbox as well as other email addresses you want them to be delivered.