Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Mining for Gold on the Dimensions Tab

Knowing what keywords bring in profits is great and will make you a lot of money. Having said that, how, when, and where you use those keywords is more important. The Dimensions tab can give you a lot of insights and a big boost to your account's bottom line. If you've been using AdWords for a couple of years, you might remember the Reporting tab. That's been discontinued, and all its functionality moved to Dimensions.

Time

You might have heard advice that the worst time of day to advertise is between midnight and 6 a.m. That might be the case (or not), but (assuming you're tracking conversions) one way to find out is to navigate to the dimensions tab and drill down to the Time of Day section.

1. Select the Dimensions tab from the center row of tabs.
2. Select a date range from the upper right (choose 30–60 days of data to get a good idea of trends).
3. Click the View: Day button and then select Time and then Hour of Day from the drop-down list.
4. Click the Hour of Day header to sort by hour of the day, starting with 0 (midnight to 12:59 a.m.) and ending with 23 (11 to 11:59 p.m.).

Say that the maximum acceptable cost per conversion is $20 (see Figure 13-4). It turns out that Hour 0 generates traffic that's too expensive ($36.88 per conversion), whereas Hour 1 brings in profitable traffic ($13.40 per conversion). This campaign should be shut down entirely between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4:59 a.m. (no conversions at all). Hours 0, 21, and 22 can have ...