Using predefined reports

Google Ads offers a raft of predefined reports that will satisfy the needs of most marketers. To access these readymade reports:

1. Choose one of your active campaigns by clicking Campaigns in the menu on the left side and choosing a campaign from the main window.

   Details about that specific campaign appear.

2. Click on Reports in the upper right-hand corner of the top toolbar.

3. From the drop-down menu that appears, choose Reports.

   You see a list of any previously saved reports, along with an option to create a custom report.

4. Click on View all to see the predefined reports.

5. Choose the report you’d like to view from the expandable list that appears.

   If you’re not sure which report to start with, I suggest you look at the Campaign report, the Ad report, and the Audience report, which are all listed under Basic reports. These three reports tell you how much you’re spending, what you’re getting in terms of clicks, which ads are performing best, and which audiences are responding the most. That information is usually enough to make some educated choices as to what you may like to do more or less of as you optimize your efforts.

Basic reports

The Basic reports section of Google Ads, shown in Figure 16-1, contains lots of predefined reports that satisfy most marketer’s needs. Your options for Basic reports appear first, with expandable boxes for other types of reports available. You can choose from the following reports:

• Campaign provides an overview of all your campaigns and your key campaign performance metrics, such as how many people have seen and clicked your ads and how much you’ve spent so far.
• Ad group is similar to the Campaign report except that it sorts your results by your ad groups, not your campaigns. This report helps you see which ad groups are performing best regardless of which campaign they exist within.
• Ad shows you which of your video ads are performing best. Look at this report, which I really like, to see if one ad is significantly performing better than others.
• Search keyword and Search terms show you the performance of your keywords if you’re running a search campaign. This report doesn’t apply to video-only campaigns.
• Final URL is an interesting report, showing you the performance of your campaigns and ad groups listed by the final destination webpage people clicked through to. If you’re running campaigns to drive people to a variety of your webpages, this handy view lets you see which pages are getting the most or least clicks, along with how much those visits to your web pages cost in media spend.
• Paid and organic concerns search campaigns and doesn’t apply to video campaigns. It lets you see how often pages from your website are being shown in Google’s organic search results listings and which search terms triggered those results to show.
• Campaign details gives a more detailed overview of the way you’ve set up your campaigns. This report includes details on whether the campaign is enabled, its type (video, display, search), your bidding strategy, and other campaign level settings. Campaign details is a nice overview if you’re running many campaigns so that you can see the full picture of what you have active.
• Ad group details is similar to Campaign details. This report gives you a snapshot of your various ad groups, such as whether they’re enabled, the bidding strategy, and other ad group level settings. Use this report if you want a picture of the general makeup of all your ad groups.
• Audience shows your campaign and ad group performance, but this time the data is split by the audiences you’re targeting. For example, this report can easily show you if a particular affinity audience is performing better than others. Audience is another great report to look at regularly.

I don’t think basic is the right way to describe these reports because it suggests they give you only basic information. In fact, they give you tons of great data that is typically of most interest to marketers. A better name would be “the most popular reports.”

Figure 16-2 shows an example of a predefined Campaign report. Most reports take this format of showing a table of data. In this report, you can see the campaigns and their status (enabled, paused, or removed), how many clicks and impressions they have delivered, and other data. (Impressions is simply the number of times your ad was shown.)

You can click the down arrow against any row header to sort the report by that dimension. For example, if you want to see your cheapest cost-per-click, click on Avg. CPC and sort from Low to High.

Creating a custom report

While the predefined reports described in the previous sections should cover most people’s needs, you can create your own custom report using only the data points that you are most concerned with (see Figure 16-3).

To create a custom report:

1. In the Reports section, click on + Custom.

2. From the drop-down menu that appears, choose your chart type.

   Your choices include table, line, bar, pie, or scatter.

3. Drag and drop any number of metrics, such as campaigns or ad groups, from the menu on the left side of the screen to the main window.

   The metrics are added to your report.

   It’s a long list! Experiment with adding different dimensions until you’re happy.

4. Name the report and click on Save.

   You can access this report at any time or schedule it to be sent automatically. (For more on scheduling, see the section “Scheduling reports.”)

Creating a custom dashboard

A dashboard, shown in Figure 16-4, is exactly what it sounds like: a handy single place where you can see the metrics that matter to you in one place. A dashboard can help you scan your data quickly and look for issues and opportunities. You can share dashboards with other people, which is a great way to focus a team’s attention on the most important numbers.

1. To create a new dashboard, click on Reports at the top of your account.
2. Click on Dashboards from the drop-down menu.

3. Click on the blue + icon to create a new dashboard.

   Any previously created dashboards are listed on this page.

   You’ll see a page with a series of grids and another blue + icon.

4. Add notes, tables, charts, and scorecards to your dashboard by clicking the blue + icon.

   You’re walked through the process of creating a custom report (see the previous section).

5. Adjust the placement of elements so that they’re to your liking.

   As you build your dashboard, the elements you add behave like movable boxes that you can expand and contract. You can change where these elements appear and the amount of space they take up.

6. When you’re done, name the dashboard and save it.

   You see your finished dashboard. You can edit it anytime to add, remove, and tweak your choices.

Scheduling reports

If you like a particular report and want to review it regularly, you can save time by scheduling it to be sent to you and any colleagues automatically.

1. In the upper right-hand corner of the report you’re viewing, click the Schedule icon.

   The Schedule dialog box, shown in Figure 16-5, appears.

2. Enter your email address or check a box to have the report sent to all account users with access to view reports.
3. Choose whether you’d like the report emailed one time only, every day, every week, or on the first day of each month.
4. Choose the file format you’d like to use for the report, such as .CSV or.XLS.
5. When ready, click on Save, and your report will be scheduled.

Brand awareness and reach metrics

Awareness is all about getting people to know who you are. If people don’t know you exist, they can’t buy your product or use your service.

Marketers interested in brand awareness and reach are primarily focused on showing their brand and message to as many people as possible. The idea is that one of the strongest drivers in getting a consumer to take an action, such as purchasing something, is the ability to simply know and recall the brand and product. If you can tell as many people as possible about your brand often enough so they remember, you’ll deliver a successful campaign.

Think of the brands who sponsor athletes, partner with celebrities, or spend big budgets on TV spots during the Super Bowl, billboards in Times Square, or the YouTube Masthead. They’re trying to reach large audiences.

Two main metrics matter for a successful brand awareness and reach campaign:

• Reach: The number of how many people who see your ad
• Frequency: How often people see your message

YouTube is a fantastic way to reach a large number of people, and based on your marketing needs, you’ll need to decide how many people you want to reach. The number of impressions is the simplest measure of success in delivering awareness.

Another way of measuring how many people you reach is the unique reach metric. The unique reach metric includes the different users who saw your ad and the average number of times they saw your ad. For example, if I see your ad once, that’s one person reached with one impression. If I see your ad again, that’s one person reached with two impressions, which is a frequency of two.

You can view your reach and frequency data by adding those columns to a custom report and creating a table. If reach and frequency data is available to you, those options appear in your left-hand side menu. Look for them under Reach metrics. (For more on creating a custom report, see the section earlier in this chapter.)

A common question I am asked is “How many people should I reach and with what frequency?” Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. Some marketers are lucky to find that they need to show their ad to a person only once or twice to make their target audience aware. On the other hand, other marketers may show their ads lots of times to people but not make much of a tangible impact. Only through testing can advanced marketers determine how many people they need to reach and the frequency of ads they need to deliver before they see the results they want. (For more on this topic, see the nearby sidebar on brand lift.)

Think of brand awareness as the foundation of your marketing strategy. Brand awareness, though, can often require a larger media budget and doesn’t guarantee immediate results, such as sales. Larger, more established marketers can make use of brand awareness campaigns, whereas smaller advertisers just getting started or who need to focus on short-term results can focus on performance campaigns like conversion. See Chapter 7 for information on setting up your brand awareness and reach campaign.

Brand and product consideration metrics

After people are familiar with your brand, product, or service, the next step in the consumer journey is to encourage them to consider you as a viable option. Of the people who are aware of you, consideration is the subset of people who are now actively thinking “This might be for me.”

Think about buying a car. Most people can name a lot of car brands, but when you start the process of searching for a new car, you usually have a handful of makes and models on your list that you’re already considering. Some of the cars you are aware of have moved into an active consideration set.

How you measure consideration depends on what you’re marketing, so consider the following as metric signals of increased consideration:

• People clicking on your ad and investigating your website
• Time spent on your product or service pages
• Downloads of files like ebooks or guides that may educate someone before they consider making a purchase
• Calls or inquiries for more information
• Store visits, if someone is browsing but not purchasing
• Email newsletter sign ups
• Follows on your social media profiles
• More views of your videos on YouTube

Other metrics may also signal that someone is showing more than just awareness of you and actively considering your brand, product, or service.

You can find reports for metrics like clicks on ads in your Campaign, Ad Groups and Ads reports, and for other metrics, such as which pages people visited on your website and how long they spent there, in Google Analytics. (For more information, see the nearby sidebar “Going further with Google Analytics.”)

In Chapter 7, you can find out how to set up a campaign with the goal of brand and product consideration, a campaign type that presents you with preset options to help people who are researching the kinds of things you offer to find and engage with you, leading to consideration.

Website traffic and leads

You may be a marketer who wants to grow the number of people visiting your website, or you may be focused on getting leads, visitors who are prospective buyers of your product or service and who will convert to a purchase or similar action.

Marketers interested in these campaign types should focus on two main measures of success:

• Clicks, which is the total number of people who clicked through to your website. You can find this metric in lots of Google Ads reports, especially in your Campaign report.
• Conversions, which is the total number of people who took the action you defined as a conversion. (See the nearby sidebar “Conversions” for more on conversions.)

When you’re looking at how many clicks your campaign delivered, look at your average cost-per-click. This metric appears in the Campaign reports and is the average amount each click cost you.

Marketers should decide what they consider to be a reasonable price to pay for each click. Usually, that amount is calculated based on the value of those clicks as they convert to something like a purchase. For example, if I find my cost per click is $1 per click and I get 100 clicks, I will have spent $100 of my media budget. If I know five of those people will convert to buy a $200 product, I’ll have made revenue of $900, based on sales of $1,000 worth of product minus the $100 of marketing cost for the clicks. That’s a great return! If no one purchases, I have to decide whether those 100 clicks were worth it by some other measure or whether I wasted my marketing budget.

If you want more people to convert, consider optimizing your landing page, which is the page people arrive at after they click on your ad. The landing page should be easy to read, give them all the information they need to decide along with links to learn more details if needed, offer compelling reasons to purchase immediately with an easy way to add your product to their cart and check out. A lot of information is out there on how to optimize landing pages, so you can do a search to find some tips if your landing page isn’t doing a good job of converting.

Although video ad campaigns can be an effective driver of both website traffic and leads, I recommend setting up both a search and a display campaign, which can be effective driving traffic. Search and display campaigns are easier and quicker to set up and often deliver a cheaper cost-per-click.

In Chapter 2, I describe a classic consumer journey where your target audience becomes aware of you, starts to consider and engage with you, eventually purchases from you, and becomes a loyal advocate of your brand. In this chapter, I cover the metrics for success for Google Ads campaigns that deliver awareness, consideration, and leads that convert to a purchase or action, but that’s only part of that complete consumer journey.

A content strategy is a great driver of engagement, loyalty, and advocacy. You can refer to Chapter 9 for more information on how to develop a content strategy. Chapter 17 has details on content metrics that matter and includes how you can measure engagement, loyalty, and advocacy marketing results.

Think of it this way: You’ll use your video ad campaigns to attract new customers (increasing awareness and consideration), you’ll use the video content on your YouTube channel to further engage them, your ad campaign to convert them (to something like a purchase), and your content to keep them coming back as loyal fans. You can craft this intertwining flow however you want, deciding the role you want ads versus content to play. Overall, a complete YouTube marketing strategy combines both advertising campaigns and a content strategy working symbiotically.

Tweaking your creative

When you launch your first campaign, you may be using only one video ad. As data comes in, look to see how it’s performing and consider

• Testing different versions of your video ad by making some small edits
• Trying different titles and thumbnails
• Making sure that you have a really compelling call to action to encourage someone to click
• If you’re using TrueView (see Chapter 4), seeing how many people are skipping the ad
• Developing theories about what worked or didn’t work and using these theories to inform the next video ad you make

Your video ad is probably the biggest lever you can pull on to improve your campaign performance. Take a look at the YouTube Ads Leaderboard (www.thinkwithgoogle.com/advertising-channels/video/leaderboards) for inspiration on what makes great video ads and check Chapter 6 for more best practices to make great creative.

Experimenting with ad formats

You can experiment with quite a few different ad formats to see which one works best for you. If you’ve made a video ad for only one format, such as TrueView, consider making edits of your video so that you can use it in other ad formats. (See Chapter 4 for an overview of ad formats.)

For example:

• Make a shorter version of your video ad so that it’s only 15 seconds long.
• Make an even shorter version of your video so that it’s a 6-second bumper, an ad which works great on mobile devices.
• Make a longer video if people are watching your video ad to completion, which suggests that people like it!
• Run companion display ads when your video ad is playing to reaffirm your message and encourage clicks.

Targeting new audiences

Improving your video ad creative and maximizing your use of ad formats available are probably the two best levers to improve your campaign’s performance (see the preceding two sections). However, the third lever is to ensure that you’re talking to the right people. (Chapter 7 covers the different options you have available to target audiences.)

Tweak each of your audience targeting settings to see whether you can improve your results:

• Use demographic targeting to target people based on gender, age, and other criteria, such as household income.
• Specifically target people based on their interests and habits with affinity targeting.
• Reach people based on whatever they’re currently looking to purchase using in-market audiences, life events, and custom intent.
• Remarket to people who have previously interacted with you in some way, which can be a powerful targeting method.

Some marketers keep their targeting broad initially and then make refinements to their campaign after they see who is responding to their ads. This strategy is often referred to as a run-of-site strategy, where you let your ads run anywhere on a site (like YouTube) and then optimize as you go.

Modifying campaign settings

You can play with a lot of variables and settings in Google Ads, which can have a big impact on results. How you set up your campaign can make a big difference. Consider

• Targeting all the relevant locations and languages and devices. Opening up your campaign to reach a broad audience is a great way to find who responds. You can narrow down who you target later.
• Letting Google automatically manage options where possible. Google always optimizes your campaign’s delivery based on your goals.
• Not overly limiting your campaign initially with too many options. Keeping things broad can help you find the best settings as time goes on.

Chapter 5 discusses the benefits of buying media yourself versus using an agency partner to help you. If at any point you find yourself feeling overwhelmed or unsure, consider reaching out to an experienced partner for help. Most quality service providers have set up many campaigns and can easily find ways to optimize your campaign for you.

The Recommendations section within Google Ads periodically provides automated optimization suggestions uniquely based on your campaign’s performance. Check this page regularly.

Altering bidding and budgets

The performance of your campaign can come down to the basic issue of budget. My last recommendation for optimization, after exhausting all others, is to increase your budget. If you make a great ad, choose smart targeting options, and set up your campaign but it’s not delivering, your bidding strategy and budgets may need to change. For example, if your ad is performing but isn’t reaching enough people, increasing your budget can help get your ad in front of more people. Chapter 7 details all the bidding and budget settings you can tweak.

Here are a few changes you can make to your bidding and budgets:

• See whether small incremental bid increases help more people see your ad. You don’t need to increase your budget by a lot immediately.
• Look to see whether your daily budget is big enough. Perhaps your video ad is shown in the morning and exhausts your budget. Adding more daily budget can help your video ad show up more often.
• If you’re reducing your audience to a more focused group, you may need to increase your bids to ensure that you win in the auction to reach those people. Often, the more targeted your audience, the more competitive your bid will need to be.
• If you’re finding your bids aren’t winning in the auction, you may need to increase your budgets and bids. You may be targeting a competitive area. If so, either increase your budgets and bids or consider targeting different audiences that are lower competition.

The single best tip I can provide to help optimize your campaign is to look at your reports daily. The Google Ad’s solution can be a bit overwhelming due to its comprehensiveness, which sometimes puts people off, but you’ll be surprised at how quickly you’ll learn your way around the tool and start to see opportunities.

Google offers a TrueView Optimization Playbook at www.thinkwithgoogle.com/products/youtube-trueview, which is an excellent guide to more advanced optimization techniques. This PDF, listed at the bottom of the page, is well worth the read.