Hidden Google AdWords reports

Hidden AdWords features During the course of your AdWords campaign, you will collect a lot of interesting and useful data. Most of the data can be found at a glance on the Google AdWords dashboard. But there are also some reports to be found that are not known to everyone. However, these reports offer very interesting data for the optimization of your search engine marketing campaigns. Below is a summary of the somewhat hidden AdWords reports.

Advertising extensions

When you add this tab you get the option to add ad extensions. These extensions are additions to the normal advertising results. These include sitelinks, location extensions, call extensions and product extensions.  The statistics you get to see in this tab will give you a good idea of the performance of the extensions you’ve added to a campaign. If you have used sitelinks, for example, you would like to know what the CTR is when displaying advertisements with sitelinks.

A footnote to this is that at this moment Google does not show data per sitelink, therefore it is not (yet) possible to see performance per sitelink by default. In this tab Google only shows the statistics of the entire advertisement when it is displayed including sitelinks. However, if you do want to measure this, then tagging the various sitelinks is a possibility.

Dimensions

This is probably the nicest and most interesting “hidden” report feature of Google AdWords. The Dimensions tab offers the possibility to segment results per a certain period of time. For example, you can see on which day of the week the campaign has the best conversion rate. You can then use this data to, for example, set an extra budget for each Monday. Of course you can also use the function to discover certain seasonal patterns.

Another interesting option is the selection destination URL, where the campaign results are viewed per landing page. This is very useful information to discover poorly performing landing pages. If you would like to have additional statistics, take a look at the heading Customize columns.

Target groups & Topics

If you use user lists for a remarketing campaign, for example, then adding a Target Groups tab is possible. This tab shows an overview of the created user lists, so you can see at a glance which remarketing campaign works best. The same applies when you target content network campaigns on topics. Here, too, you can add extra columns of information.

Actually, the above functions are very useful and sometimes even indispensable in the optimization process of an AdWords campaign. Maybe you are already using these functions, if not it is advisable to look at the possibilities.