Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Improving Performance

There’s a great deal of information contained in the average AdWords account. This information—ads and keywords and the related performance data—is stashed away in ad groups. These ad groups are themselves contained in AdWords campaigns.

To make effective use of AdWords, you need to be able to get to this information. In other words, drilling down into one ad group after another will only provide piecemeal data and usually won’t give you the kind of picture you need to improve performance.

For CPC ads, an ad group consists of the text of an ad and its targeted keywords, along with budget choices. For CPM ads, an ad group consists of the creative for the ad or its text, the targeted domains, and budget choices.

It’s pretty unlikely for an ad, or an ad campaign, to be perfect the first time round. A great part of the craft of creating effective campaigns is to see how your ads and campaigns are doing, tweak them, see how the improved ads and campaigns are doing, tweak again, and iterate the process. In other words, if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.

This chapter explains how to monitor your AdWords campaigns and AdWords ad groups performance, and how to use the tools that AdWords provides to improve ad and campaign performance.

Monitoring Your AdWords Activity

When you open AdWords, the initial screen you’ll see is the Account Snapshot, partially shown in Figure 11-1. By glancing at the Account Snapshots window, you can see whether there ...