Regular PPC Reporting: Worthwhile or Worthless?

There are a number of reports available at a user’s disposal on Google Adwords. Some will use these on a regular basis. Some may dabble in the odd report from time to time (you know – open them up, have a bit of a browse at the information in a scattergun approach, then the phone will ring, and it’ll be 3 months before you repeat the process all over again). And some, well, they probably didn’t know you could run reports through Adwords!

But is conducting regular reporting through Google Adwords a worthwhile or worthless practice for those in PPC? I’m sure you already can sense the opinion of this blogger – I mean come on, why would Google place so much information at your disposal if it was all pointless and added no value? Regular reporting is an incredibly worthwhile practice, but it is essential that you know what you are looking for, and when you find it, knowing what you are going to do with that information.

So what sort of reports should we be running on a regular basis, and why are they so valuable?

Account/Campaign Report

Either of the above reports can be incredibly useful when the unit of time is broken down to be viewed by an hourly period. In this format, we are able to see how many impressions and clicks an account or individual campaign is receiving, which are then broken down by each hour of the day.

Why would this useful you may be thinking?

Primarily, this type of report is fantastic for assessing how well your daily budget is performing. If you start to discover a trend in the report where from 8pm onwards most days that the impressions and clicks drop substantially, or are non-existent, then it would be safe to say that your budget is running out far too early. The answer? Drop your bids and assess again a few days later.

Of course, this only works if your campaign is set to accelerated delivery – if it’s set to standard delivery, you will see your budget lasting all day, whether it’s sufficient or not. If you are using standard delivery, you should run an Impression Share report.

Campaign Report with the use of Impression Share (IS)

The use of Impression Share (or ‘IS’ as it can be referred to through Google), is a way of taking the data available from a standard Campaign Report and moving up to a whole other level of detail. The report is run in a very similar way to that of the report described above, with the only alteration being the selection of the ‘Lost Impression Share’ options in the data filters section. The lost impression share can be split into two variables; by rank and by budget.

‘Lost impression share by rank’ allows us to see the percentage of impressions a campaign has lost out on due to an advert position appearing too low (normally by dropping down onto page 2 of search results). For example, if the report displays that a campaign received 1000 impressions in a given day, but had a 50% lost impression share by rank, then we know that we have lost out on a potential further 1000 impressions due to our adverts displaying too low down. This of course would then allow us to assess whether the bid prices need to be increased to boost our advert positions and take greater advantage of total traffic.

A lost impression share by budget is a more detailed version of the campaign/account report mentioned earlier. Similarly to a lost impression share by rank, this will tell us how many impressions were lost due to the budget being spent. If we are seeing that by 8pm the budget has spent, but for the remaining 4 hours of the day we are missing out on further impressions, then decisions need to made about increasing the budget or decreasing the bids. If your advert delivery is set to standard, the daily lost impression share by budget will tell you whether your budget is sufficient, given your bids.

Search Query Report

A search query report is probably the most common report that will be run, or more appropriately, should be running in any typical Adwords campaign.

For those not familiar, a search query report allows us to see all the keyword searches that led to clicks on a campaign over a given period of time. This type of report is absolutely fantastic for a campaign heavily focussed on a number of phrase match and broad match terms. It can be used to identify any additional useful keyword terms that weren’t originally identified when the campaign was set up, allowing us to add these in as exact match keywords going forward. On the reverse side, it will also display any rogue keyword searches that have no relevance to the campaign, which can then be added in as negative keywords.

Take the following as an example:

We have a client that publicises themselves as a public speaker through their own personal website, and has a PPC campaign set up to aid this promotion. One keyword on the campaign is the phrase match “famous talking”. Through a recent search query report, we were able to identify a search had been made for ‘famous talking speakers’. Great – that can go as an exact match from now on I thought. A little further down the search query report, I discover that the campaign had also received a click for ‘famous talking dogs’. Not really what we were looking for! So in that goes as a negative, never to see the light of day again.

Imagine those that don’t run regular search query reports and are missing out on the above? Not only would you be missing out on identifying new key terms for the campaign, but more worryingly, a heck of a lot of clicks and spend could be heading right down the drain.

So is regular reporting worthwhile or worthless in any PPC campaign? I think I’d go as far as to say that it’s essential.

Tags: Adwords, PPC, ppc reporting