Viewing Reports

To view reports of your ad campaign’s performance, click the Reports tab when you log in to your AdWords account. If it’s your first time in the Reports tab, you’ll want to first create a report by clicking the Create a Report now link.

The Create Report page contains everything you need to create powerful custom reports. Begin by selecting the type of report you want to create from these choices:

• Keyword Performance: See how each of your keywords is performing.

• Ad Performance: See reports on the overall performance of all your ads.

• URL Performance: See performance based on the destination URLs you’ve specified in your ads.

• Ad Group Performance: View performance at the Ad Group level rather than at the campaign level.

• Campaign Performance: See reports on the performance of all your Ad Campaigns.

• Account Performance: See the performance of your entire AdWords account.

After you select the type of report you want to create, you must select the type of report based on time. For example, you may create a summary report, or daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly reports.

Specify a date range by either selecting a range from the drop-down list or by typing a range with begin and end dates. Typing your own range is particularly important when specifying your company’s fiscal year, which may begin and end midyear.

Select which of your campaigns you want included in the report - all or selections from a list of campaigns. After you select which campaigns, you have the choice of altering which columns appear in the report and filtering the report. You can filter based on a number of criteria such as whether the ads are content- or search-type ads, whether keywords are active or have some other status, the level of keyword matching you’ve set up, a particular keyword, the level of average position ads have maintained, clicks, cost, average Cost Per Click (CPC), Click Through Ratio (CTR), and number of impressions.

After you finish building your report, you need to give it a meaningful name. It’s probably not a good idea to give it a name such as Report #1 or My AdWords Report. Give the report a meaningful name, such as Fiscal Year Performance – All Campaigns.

Select whether this report you are creating is a template from which you can create future reports, possibly specifying different date ranges or selecting different ad campaigns. Then tell Google how often you want the report run; these are your choices:

• Every day

• Every Monday

• First day of every month

You can choose to be notified by e-mail when the report runs or even receive the report via e-mail. When receiving a report via e-mail, you need to select the format in which it is sent to you. You can choose formats that easily allow you to include them in spreadsheets, such as CSV files, or you can send them out to company-wide reader programs that expect an XML format or for easy viewing in HTML. Click Create Report to create your report or template.

In addition to viewing your reports in e-mail, you also can click the Reports tab to view reports that have been run. Click the Report Center link in the Reports tab to view existing reports.

Cross-Ref 

Learn more about how to analyze your ad’s performance using Google Analytics in Chapter 36.