If you take the time to customize your columns in your Google AdWords dashboard, you will save yourself a ton of effort drilling into your data later. The default columns in AdWords are crap. And these crappy columns need different dimensions displayed depending on what type section your in (adgroups, campaigns, keywords, etc.) When doing custom AdWords training in San Francisco, this is some of the first stuff I change in people’s accounts.
Let’s take a look at the campaign columns that come up by default:
Yikes this is crap. Interaction rate? Where are conversions? Cost per conversion? What about ad position? The real info. you need to make decisions is sorely lacking.
Add the data mentioned above using the “columns” button in the middle of the page. Be sure to save it so you don’t have to add them every time you login.
Add these same metrics to your ad group columns. Then, jump over to the keywords section and be sure to get quality score added as a column. The keyword section will be where Google tells you why a KW has such low quality score and what changes you can make to improve it.
Knowing your quality scores is like knowing where the missed opportunity is to save money. Improve these and you’ll be able to bid less while maintaining the same keyword position.
Lastly, if you have a call only campaign there are a sleuth of other performance metrics you can choose from. Ad these to your “ads” columns and save it as well so they’ll be applied each time you view your account.
It’s strange that a lot of this is not added by default, but that’s AdWords for you. For more info on how to become an expert at AdWords, contact me using the form below or email corttafoya@gmail.com. Thanks for reading.
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