Google ads Reporting: Our Top 9 Picks

Google ads Reporting: Our Top 9 Picks

When it comes to digital marketing, those who can find, analyze, and use the vast amounts of data available are typically able to get the upper hand against the competition. With competition online getting more and more fierce each day along with frequent platform changes, it’s more important than ever to make sure all of your marketing dollars and being put to the best use possible, and that you avoid making common Google ads mistakes.

If you are advertising on the Google Ads platform, there are a plethora of reports available for you to use in order to get a better understanding of what’s going on with your advertising account. As it may be a bit difficult to make sense of just which Google ads reports to create and look at, here are our top 9 Google Ads reports that will help you keep your finger on the pulse of your Google advertising.

1. The Ad Performance Report

This report, as the name may suggest, shows the performance of each individual ad. While it may be difficult to make sense of this data if you do not have common themes in your ads, this report will show you all the statistics per ad, with one row per ad. If you have other segment fields used in order to group your ads in certain ways, you may have more than one row per ad.

2. The URL Performance Report

If you are interested in seeing how each individual URL you are driving traffic to is performing, the URL performance report would be a great place to start. However, if you have many URLs in your advertising account, it can be difficult to make sense of this data. Analyzing this data can be very helpful in understanding where to send your customers for the highest probability of a conversion.

For example, if you are looking for opt ins for an email list, does it make sense to send your customers directly to the opt in page? Or does directing them to a short video lead to a higher conversion rate? What about if instead of a video you have a short article for your visitors to read before signing up? By looking at the success rates of these different URLs, you can begin to be more tactful in where you send potential customers or clients.

3. The Ad Group Performance Report

If you have a larger account with thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of keywords, the ad group performance report will allow you to get more of a bird’s eye view of your ad performance, aggregated by ad group.

4. The Campaign Performance Report

For an even higher-level view of your account than the ad group level, the campaign performance report can be extremely useful as well. With campaign level data going back to the origination of your account, you can use the campaign performance report to see how your performance has changed over time to make sure you’re headed in the right direction.

5. The Account Performance Report

Even higher up than the campaign performance report, is the account performance report. This report will show your account’s performance at the highest level available. While you may not get much actionable data from this report, it can be useful in comparing account level performance over time.

6. The Demographic Performance Report

One of the best parts about advertising on Google Ads is the amount of segmentation you can do. If you want to target 25 to 35 year old females and 45 to 55 year old males from certain areas, it has never been easier with the power of Google. With all the segmentation power Google has, it’s important to keep an eye on the advertising performance of these different groups.

With the demographic performance report, you can see how each of your selected advertising demographics are performing. Armed with this knowledge, you can make well informed decisions about where to double down and where to pull in the reins.

7. The Geographic Performance Report

With people from all over the world potentially viewing your ad, it can be very illuminating to see where your visitors are coming from and how your advertising performance may vary from region to region. By looking at the Geographic Performance report, you can view where the visitors who interact with your advertisements are located based on their IP address.

By taking a good look at this report, you may be able to narrow your advertising focus to only high performing locations. Armed with this information, your business or client may be able to make better decisions about where to focus offline marketing dollars as well.

8. The Search Query Performance Report

While you may be advertising on Google Ads for specific keywords, many times your visitors will find you based on a search query. For example, if you are advertising for the keyword “women’s fashion,” your potential customer may be searching for “best men’s jacket for winter.” With the search query performance report, you can track the performance data for these individual search queries which are directing potential customers to your advertisement.

9. The Devices Performance Report

With so much of search moving off of desktops and onto mobile and tablets instead, it’s important to keep an eye on how your ads are performing among these different device types. By analyzing how your ads are performing among different device types, you may be able to spot issues quickly and make proactive changes. For example, if your website is not mobile friendly, you can likely expect to see poor performance among your ads when visitors come from a mobile device. To learn more about some of the nuances of the devices report, check out this link.

As the predominant search engine on the web, Google has an unimaginable amount of data. By partnering with Google Ads for your advertising efforts, you are going to get a small piece of that data and even just that sliver may be difficult to make sense of. By getting more familiar with the above 9 reports as well as the other reports available from Google, you can get a leg up on your competition by being able to make better, faster decisions that can lead to higher advertising ROI.