This is part 2 of a guest post by Xurxo Vidal. Xurxo is a co-founder and search marketing strategist at Bloom Search Marketing – an agency specialized in paid search campaigns, SEO, Google Analytics and conversion improvement. We are lucky to have him here today to talk about optimizing Adwords campaigns. You can find more of Xurxo’s writings on his company’s blog.

This article is part 2 of a 2 part article on adwords reports that can increase conversions and save you money. If you haven’t done so already, please check out part 1 here

In part 1 , we covered the keyword performance report, the ad performance report and the geographic performance report.

The remaining reports I’ll cover in this post are:

• Search Query Performance Report
• Placement Performance Report

Search Query Report

The search query report can be your best friend in finding those pesky unrelated keywords that you’re paying for – especially if you’re using broad match keywords. This report will show you what keywords were actually typed into Google that caused your ads to appear. When you use broad or even phrase match keywords in your campaigns you’ll often find that Google takes some liberties on what search queries they allow your ads to show up for. With this report you’ll be able to find some of those variations and add them in to your campaign as negative keywords.

The search query report also helps you discover relevant keywords you don’t already have in your campaigns that perform well for you. You can add these in to your campaign so you can bid on them directly. Just be sure to add them to the most relevant adgroups or create new ones if necessary so you can improve the CTR and conversion rates.

Some ways to find problem keywords are to:

• Sort by the most costly keywords and look for those that don’t make sense to keep paying for – add these as negatives.
• Sort by the most impressions and look for keywords that have a low CTR – these might be unrelated to what you’re offering and may need to be added as negatives. If some of these are relevant, you may need to create new adgroups and write ads that relate more closely to these keywords in order to improve the CTR and give them a better chance of driving more conversions.

Some ways to find performing keywords you don’t already have in your campaign(s):

• Sort by the most costly keywords and look for those that generate a low cost per conversion. These keywords are worth including in your campaign and maybe even bidding higher for them depending on how well they are converting traffic to customers for you.
• Sort by the most conversions and look for keywords that convert but at a higher cost per conversion than you’re prepared to pay.
  
  1. Place these in the most relevant adgroup – create new ones if necessary with better written ads that relate to them. You should be looking to clarify what you’re offering to make sure you’re only attracting the right kind of visitor to click on your ads.
  2. Check to see which pages the traffic from these keywords is being sent to. If there’s a better/more relevant page, try sending traffic there to see if you can improve the conversion rate – this will help bring down the cost per conversion.
• Look for keywords with a higher than average CTR and include them in your campaign if they are relevant. Assuming your goal is not just traffic, but also conversions, you’ll want to make sure they are performing on that basis as well. Nonetheless, keywords with a high CTR help your quality score which in turn helps keep your CPC (Cost per Click) lower.


In addition I recommend you check out the post Adwords And PPC – The Biggest Money Wasting Mistake That New Users Make Steve published a little while ago about how you can setup an advanced filter in Google Analytics to reveal the exact search query that someone typed in which was triggered by your broad and phrase match keywords. This will give you additional keywords that the Search Query Performance report may not reveal since Google doesn’t share all the data for privacy reasons.


Placement Performance Report

For those of you advertising on the content network this report can offer you a wealth of information. It shows you the websites and individual URLs where your ads have been displayed. More importantly, you’ll be able to see which sites or specific pages on the sites are converting better for you and you can target them individually and bid higher on them.

This report will also reveal which sites you should exclude from your content network campaign. Just like with keywords and ads, you’ll want to pay attention to sites that drive a large number of impressions and few clicks as well as sites that bring you traffic, but that don’t convert at a ratio that meets your business goals.

When you find sites that are costing you money but not converting well enough for you, you can exclude these from your campaign to prevent them from showing your ads in the future. Likewise when you find sites that perform well, you can manage these separately and increase your bids on those sites or even specific pages on those sites.


Scheduling Your Reports

To help automate the process of running these reports Google allows you to schedule them to run and be emailed to you automatically on a daily, weekly (every Monday) or monthly (1st of every month) schedule.

Once you’re comfortable with the different date ranges you’ll need to use for each report to get enough actionable data, then I recommend that you schedule them to be emailed to you at a frequency you’re comfortable with. Don’t choose to run and email them “every day” if you don’t have the time to review the reports on a daily basis and take action on them. You’ll just get frustrated and have too much information to go over. The point is to find those hidden gems and problems lurking in your account so you can take action on them and get better results from your investment in AdWords in a continuous basis.

Final Words

Feel free to leave comments if you have any questions for Xurxo. Seriously folks, Xurxo does this for a living so you should take advantage of him as a resource while you can. Don’t be shy!

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