Have you ever gotten in your car and started driving without a destination in mind? If so, it probably wasn’t the most efficient use of your time. The same can be said of running search campaigns without using reporting. Reports are like the road map of the search highway. They can show you where you’ve been, and also where you are going, if you know how to spot the trends. This post is designed to give you some good tips on how to get the most out of that little "Reports" tab in adCenter so that you can improve your performance and be more efficient.
If you are new to adCenter reporting, you’ll want to read this post on some of the basics of the reporting tab. Tomorrow, we’ll dive into some useful reports and what to look for in those reports in order to help you improve your campaign performance.
A quick intro to adCenter Reporting
To access the reporting feature in adCenter, simply click on the "reports" tab. This will bring you to the reporting center. From here, you will have the option to create a new report, view or download one of your most recent reports, and view or run one of your saved report templates.
Let’s start with creating a new report. Click on the “Create new report” button.
Basic Settings
Use the “Report” dropdown box to select what type of report you want to run.
There are 3 types of reports.
- Delivery – these reports will show key metrics such as impressions, clicks, CTR, and CPC for your account, campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords.
- Billing and Budget – these reports will give you information on how your account has been spending and how it has been billed.
- Targeting – these reports will show the estimated impression rate and click rate for age, gender and geographic locations based on customers who are clicking on your ads
After selecting the report type, you need to pick the view (unit of time). This is just the way you would like the data to be arranged in the report. If you want to see a summary of account performance for a particular date range then you would select the "summary" view. You have several options to choose from here depending on what report type you picked:
- Summary
- Hour
- Day
- Week
- Month
- Year
After selecting the view, you need to pick the date range that you want the data to be pulled from. You will have several options to choose from here as well:
- Today
- Yesterday
- Last 7 Days
- This Month
- Last Month
- Custom Date Range
Once you have the basic report setting selected, you can move onto the advanced settings.
Advanced Settings
Under the advanced settings section, you can change the scope of the report. If you have multiple accounts and only want to run the report on one of them, you can pick which one here. You will click the "specific accounts, campaigns, and ad groups" button and then click on the particular data group that you want to run in the report.
After selecting the proper group of data to run in the report, you can change the columns and layout of the report by clicking on "change columns and layout". You will see the default layout and can add or remove columns by clicking on the "add or remove columns" button. The available columns and values will be listed in the chart. Select the items you want to add or deselect the items you want to get rid of. You can also click on the items in the layout view and drag them to change how they are arranged on the report.
Once you have selected the report layout, you can now filter your results based on a number of different values.
- Filter by Ad Distribution – this lets you distinguish between Content or Search
- Filter by Keywords – this lets you type in specific keywords that you want to appear in the report and everything else will be omitted
- Filter by Delivered Match Types – this lets you select the match type (broad, content, exact or phrase) that you want to show up on the report
- Filter by Language and market – this is mainly used for advertisers who are running ads on our other networks. If you are one of these advertisers, select which market you want to show on the report
- Filter by Ad Type – this section will be used more often in the future when mobile ads really start to take off
Templates and scheduling (optional)
The final section on the reports wizard is the template and scheduling tool. Here you can change the name of a report, save a report as a template, and schedule a report to run automatically.
When you select to have the report run automatically, you need to fill out some information. Select how often you want the report to run and which day you want the report to run on. You also will need to select which email address you want the report to be sent to. You can select up to 10.
Once you are done with editing the report settings, click on the "create new report" button. Your report will process and display when it is finished.
When the report displays, you can choose to download it as a CSV file or as a zip file.
Tomorrow I'll cover ways to analyze the data in your reports to adjust and improve your campaigns. In the meantime, if you have questions or comments about this post, or other reporting questions, let us know on the adCenter Forum. You can also watch the adCenter Reports Flash tutorial.