By Helen Brown
An essential part of the learning process when studying for your exam is application of the learning material. As discussed in previous posts, it is the true way of comprehending how it all works, from budgets to campaign settings……….and reporting.
I know that I am not going to be on my own when I confess that I initially found reporting tough to understand, I felt so confused by all of the different report types and completely overwhelmed just by looking at the reporting section of my account. I didn’t know where to start, but after thoroughly reading the learning material and taking all that I had learned back to my account for practical application, I began to understand how these valuable account functions worked. Anyone who is studying to sit the Fundamentals exam for the first time should be prepared to answer questions on AdWords reporting functions (as well as many other account topics) but the purpose of this post today is to discuss basic reporting, including running, downloading and analysing reports. I hope you find it useful!
Why use reporting?
Quite simply, it is a full and comprehensive way of understanding your performance. From maintaining a cost effective ad spend to gauging how successful your advertising message is, reporting will give full and detailed information. It is flexible and can be taken to the level you need from account, campaign, ad group, ad and keyword level. Upon viewing this information, you can make better informed decisions about how you can improve and further refine your advertising.
There are various report types, lets take a look at a few -
Campaign report: Use this report to monitor the performance of your account.
In order to create a campaign report, you will need to be within the campaigns tab of your account and select the appropriate campaign (or you can view statistics for all of the campaigns in your account if you don’t select a specific campaign). Just above the graph section of the page, you will see that you have the options to customize the level of information that appears on your table by using the columns (click to customize your columns, you can add columns to your table giving detailed information on performance, conversions, and attribute information etc), filters (helping you to filter information by click, Impression, cost etc) and segments (helping you to break down the information by network, device, top v’s other, daily, weekly and monthly performance etc).
Keyword report: Use this report to view statistics on how your keywords are performing for all of your online campaigns and ad groups or for a specific campaign.To create this report, you need to click the keywords tab within the campaigns tab of your account. As above, you can use filters and segments to include the necessary level of information in your report and schedule, email and generate the report. After customizing to your liking, you can view information such as if a particular keyword is converting well for you, also you can see if you have a good CTR and your average position per keyword. It is recommended to leave your keywords run for at least 10 days to 2 weeks before deciding to pause or delete them so you can make a well informed decision based on a reasonable amount of data that has been gathered in your account. If you see a large number of CTR of under 1% then you may wish to consider pausing or deleting the keyword, as this would not be classed as a well performing keyword. Another statistic to analyze in this report is seeing high impressions but low CTR, this is another indication of poor keyword performance that you may want to consider pausing.
Ad Performance report: Use this report to see how the variations of ads you have created are performing. To create this report, you will need to click the ads tab within the campaigns tab of your account. Again, use the filters and segments to customize to your liking. Google recommend having at least 3 ads in an ad group when using this report. Look at your CTR and you will see which of your ads are the best performers with the most enticing text. You can consider pausing or deleting poor performers from viewing this information too. You can also see your ads approval status.
See search terms report: Use this report to see the real actual search terms that have been used to trigger your ads on the search network. This is incredibly useful! To create this report, you will need to click the keywords tab within the campaigns tab of your account, and then ‘see search terms’ and select all. You will be presented with a list of keywords that users have searched on. Don’t worry about trying to remember if you are already using these keywords within your campaigns, as a green ‘added’ note will be with the keyword if it is already present in your account so you will know not to re add it. After studying the statistics you will be able to see new keywords with high performance rates and you can add these to your campaigns by marking the appropriate check boxes by the side of the desired keywords and selecting ‘add as keyword’. Also, you can choose to apply negatives if you find search terms that are irrelevant by the same method, again by marking the check boxes and then clicking ‘add as negative keyword’.
Geographic report: Use this report to view statistics for your ads which will be organized by the users location. To create this report, you will need to click the dimensions tab within the campaigns tab of your account (if you cannot see this tab, click the drop down arrow next to the last tab and check the box next to dimensions). Then, click the view menu in the tool bar and select geographic. You will see statistics listed based on your country targeting, and if you are targeting in the UK you will see regions and cities too. You can customize your columns, and you will be able to see in which countries your ads are best performing.
After generating and studying these reports you can choose to select a format from the drop down, select to email recipients, and finally you will need to click to download the report.
To open the download panel, click the download icon. At this point you can choose to email and schedule the report. It is important to remember to set your appropriate date range at the top right of the page before generating your report. A few things to keep in mind when thinking about downloading and emailing reports………………. You can select the format of the report from the drop down, but if you want to download and print the report, a PDF format is the best format to choose. Also, in the interest of account security, you can only email a report to someone if they have account access. The best way to give access to a person is to add them as an email only user from ‘My account’ > ‘Access’.
I hope this helps to give a clear understanding of some of the reporting features. Good luck! 
