How To Read a Search Advertising Report

Basic AdWords Information

To fully understand the report there’s a few things you should know about AdWords and how your account is structured.

• AdWords is made up of Keywords, Ad Groups, Campaigns.
• Keywords are the “building blocks” of the account and allow your ads to show up based on specific search queries people make on Google.
• Ad Groups are families of contextually related Keywords that are relevant to a subset of ads. This is a way of organizing like Keywords to ensure that the ads and landing pages are the most relevant to the user query.
• Campaigns house all of the Ad Groups that are being targeted. Campaigns are often designated by budget, geography, and expected performance and you may see that you have multiple Campaigns in your account.

Glossary of Terms

• Impressions: The number of times your ad is shown. An impression is counted every time your ad is shown on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
• Clicks: The number of times your ad was clicked on, leading to a website visit.
• Conversions: When someone clicks on your ad and completes a desired action, such as an appointment booking or phone call.
• Ad Group: A set of keywords, ads, bids, placements and targeting methods. Each ad campaign contains one or more ad groups.
• Keyword: The words or phrases you select that are highly relevant to your product or service to help determine where and when your ads appear.
• Campaign: The structure within AdWords that holds your keywords and ad groups. All ad groups within a Campaign share a budget and similar settings around targeting. You can have one or many campaigns as part of your AdWords account.
• CTR (Click-Thru-Rate): Clicks divided by impressions. The proportion of people who see your ad that then click on it.
• CPC (Cost-Per-Click): The amount, on average, that each click on your ad costs.
• Conversion Rate: Conversions divided by clicks. The proportion of people who click on your ad that then take a secondary “conversion” action such as a phone call or booking.
• Cost/Conversion (Cost-Per-Conversion): The cost of your total ad spend divided by the number of conversions.
• Avg. Position: This AdWords metric shows how your ad ranks against other ads. This determines the order in which ads appear on a page.
• Impression Share: The number of impressions your ads have received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.

Reading Your Report

• Performance Summary
  • This section gives details of the number of Impressions, Clicks, and Conversions your account received during the reporting period. It then breaks down the cost per each of these metrics based on the amount spent on ads during that period. Lastly, it gives period-over-period comparisons on each of these metrics.
• Sales Funnel
  • This section details out the journey a user takes when first seeing your ad, then clicking on it, and then finally making a conversion action.
• Trends
  • This section details out, by day, how many clicks and conversions your campaigns received.
• Avg. by Day of Week
  • This section details out, by day of the week, how many clicks and conversions your campaigns received. This is important to measure over time in order to make strategic decisions regarding ad schedules and bid optimizations.
• Top Ad Groups
  • A list of the top 9 ad groups, ranked in order based on conversion volume.
• Top Keywords
  • A list of the top 9 keywords, ranked in order based on conversion volume.
• Top Campaigns (Detailed)
  • This section gives further details of the main metrics measured at the campaign level.
• Top Ad Groups (Detailed)
  • This section gives further details of the main metrics measured at the ad group level.
• Top Keywords (Detailed)
  • This section gives further details of the main metrics measured at the keyword level.
• Top Ads (Detailed)
  • This section gives further details of the main metrics measured at the ad level. One of the most important metrics to take note of here is CTR (Click-Thru-Rate), since that gives us a good indication of how relevant the ad is to the user’s search query.