Are You Really Analyzing Your Data?

Hey Guys,

Today I want to ask you guys are you REALLY analyzing your AdWords Data? Answer these questions:

Do you have a separate campaign for search and for content?

Do you run your search campaign on Broad match as well as phrase and exact match?

Does your content network campaign run on automatic placements? or do you select your placements yourself?

No answer is a wrong answer to these questions ( unless you are running on the search and the content network in one campaign of course) but based on your answers I want to provide you with some fun ways to optimize your campaigns.

For example if you run any of your keywords on broad or phrase match, do you use the search query report? You should be. The search query report is an awesome way…and I mean awesome way to get a better ROI in your account.

The search query report basically tells you what search queries resulted in a click on your ad. This is useful as the report can give you some great ideas on keywords that you might want to add as negatives to your account campaign. For example if I’m running on the sport “Golf” on Broad match and someone has searched on “Volkswagen golf” and clicked on my ad, I know now that I should really add Volkswagen as a negative to my campaign.

Likewise if I’m advertising on “Golf” on broad match and I notice in the search query report that I’ve had a number of people click and convert on the keyword “Best Golf clubs” I know that I should add that to my campaign.

Little changes add up to make big improvements to your campaign. Don’t forget to check out your search query report for some great ideas for campaign negatives and additional keywords.

As for the content network.,if you are running your content network campaigns on automatic placements, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it means you can collect some very useful data. Once you have that  data, I’d certainly suggest pausing the automatic placements on the content network and switch over to managed placements.

In the AdWords interface (as I know most of you use this, tisk, tisk ) you are able to export your placements data into excel. I’ll make a video for you in the coming days to demonstrate. Sort your data by conversions and then by cost per conversions.

Now we have a list of all of the placements ‘websites’ that your ads have appeared on in the Google AdWords content network. We also can now see where our money is going.  I did this for one of my AdWords audits clients the other day and just this one method of analyzing data helped us determine how to keep the budget at its currently level of spend but DOUBLE the amount of conversions his campaign is bringing in each month. That is pretty awesome.

In addition we found out that two placements in particular were generating a ton of conversions at a 75% discount from his ‘average cost per conversion’. Can you guess what one of these placements was? His best performing placement was for “mail.google.com” otherwise known as Gmail..and he wasn’t even optimizing for that type of placement. Talk about amazing red flags. He can know take that information and optimize an entire campaign for Gmail and more than likely decrease his costs yet again. The other placement was facebook, in case you were wondering.

In AdWords it is all about allocating your budget properly. Taking money away from keywords or placements that are more expensive conversions and reallocating it to the less expensive conversions.

Make sure to review your account data…it can be very rewarding.