The 6/90 Rule: 6 Reports Contain 90% Of Actionable AdWords Insights

Google offers numerous AdWords reports that allow you to view more data than most people have time to analyze. One of the tricks to working with PPC is to determine what data you need to look at every day or week, and then determine what data is useful to analyze when improving your AdWords account.

There are six reports that, when used effectively, can give you the majority of insight you need to analyze your accounts on a day-to-day basis. In part 1 of this two-part series, I’ll take you through these reports to find insight into your accounts. In part two, I’ll take an in-depth look at the keyword report to create actionable items from the data.

While these reports are easy to run they are most effective when combined with the AdWords conversion tracking script. This is a different feature than what you find in Google Analytics. The conversion tracking script sends data from your website back to AdWords so that you can see conversion information in your AdWords reports. In walking through these reports, I’ll make the assumption that you are using this script. If you are not, then you can still use these reports; however, you should marry up the data with the analytics package you are using to track conversions to get a complete picture of what’s going on.

The keyword report

The AdWords keyword report should be your starting place for analyzing keyword data. This report shows metrics by individual keywords within your account. For instance, the main data points to examine when reviewing information by keyword are:

Impressions
Clicks
CTR
Conversions
Cost per conversion
Conversion rate
Value per click

There are three main uses of this report:

Set bids based upon cost per conversion or other metrics with your established bid methodology
Find low quality score keywords with high spends so you can optimize for quality score (note: it can be useful to use a pivot table to find AdGroups with high spend and low quality scores. See Josh Dreller’s In The Trenches column about mastering pivot tables for more info).
Find keywords that are not on page one (where the first page bid is higher than your max CPC). Remember, though, that just because your keyword is not on page one does not mean you should raise your bid to be on page one. If you cannot be profitable on page one, then you need to decide if this is a word that can be on page two; if not, you need to optimize the landing page, ad text, or other factors for this keyword before you raise your bid to be on page one.
In part two of this article, I’ll take a deep dive into the keyword report to show various ways of working with the data it produces.

The search query report

The search query report will show you the query that was actually typed into a search engine that caused your ad to be displayed. For instance, if you bid on the broad match “coffee mugs,” your ad could show for “yellow coffee cups,” “blue coffee mug” or possibly even “tea cup.”

Use the search query report to find words that are not converting yet are consuming your ad-spend dollars. When you find such words add them as negative keywords.

Then use the report to find words that are converting and are not keywords in your account—consider these to be Google’s gift to you to help you improve the overall importance of your campaign. Add these words as keywords so that you can bid on these words based upon their actual returns. Remember, your broad match keywords will never convert higher than your exact match keywords.

When you conduct keyword research, you should always consult the search query report as part of your keyword expansion methodology.

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Google Opens Up Digital-Education Portal

Google has spent a lot of time in the past few years trying to quell fears it's out to disintermediate advertising agencies. Now it's undertaking a major effort trying to educate them on all things digital.

Enter AgencyLand. It may sound like an amusement park, but it's actually an online educational portal Google is developing for ad shops, one that likely will help the search giant deeper entrench itself in an ad-agency community that's often been wary of it.

The AgencyLand platform, now in beta with select agencies, houses a ton of Google-centric content created for agency staff. Naturally, much of it is focused on digital topics. There are webinars, a searchable library with more than 200 marketing case studies and short, on-demand video segments featuring Google leaders such as Chief Economist Hal Varian. It also aggregates Google's array of ad tools, such as a media-planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers and a website optimizer, which helps measure user behavior on web pages.

Google maintains it has altruistic intentions of bettering everyone's digital knowhow, but the program surely doubles as a marketing effort. Given that Google offers advertisers the chance to essentially help themselves create highly measurable and relevant, if unflashy, ads, agencies have been wary that Google could one day get between them and clients. Many shops -- perhaps realizing the search giant simply cannot be ignored -- have opted to work with Google rather than against it. Most publicly, French holding company Publicis Groupe has publicly touted partnerships with Google to work on digital ad technology. But there have also been moments of friction, such as when Martin Sorrell, chief of holding company WPP, took to calling Google a "frenemy" (which he later amended to "froe").

So could AgencyLand just be the latest PR flourish in a Google-Madison Ave. history that's seen plenty of them? That depends on where you sit. "We're not going to deal with an agency that doesn't know Google," said one digital expert at a blue-chip marketer. "It's a barrier to entry."Getting schooled
Asked whether Google's intention is to use AgencyLand for marketing purposes, Spencer Spinnell, director-agency development and strategy, said: "Our objective is really that it's an educational tool. ... I think it's good for digital media at large."

While there are some reasons for skepticism, Google, which needs agency buy-in for a host of reasons, has big ambitions for AgencyLand. Earlier this year it asked 10 shops across different holding companies, including Ogilvy, Initiative, Starcom and Carat, to serve as its guinea pigs while it works out the kinks. It's in the process of rolling the platform out to a second batch of shops for testing (DraftFCB, Martin Agency, DDB, Digitas, Group M, BBDO, 360i and Razorfish) and estimates it will make AgencyLand widely available to agencies late this year or early next.

Usage of the portal is free. The search giant said it had received requests from the agency community for training that would help employees stay ahead of the digital curve. The timing of the platform's release is ideal, Google said, because it enables agencies to continue boosting their digital chops even at a time when most are cash-strapped.

"In a down economy, training is one of the first things to get cut" Mr. Spinnell said. He said he believes AgencyLand offers a way for agencies to "take their knowledge workers and make them smarter."

The biggest piece of feedback from agency users so far has been a recommendation to make the training sessions shorter and more digestible. Google went back to the drawing board and created a series of 15-minute graphical seminars with voice-over instructions. "The idea is that a planner or creative can [complete segments] while eating lunch at their desk," Mr. Spinnell said.

Certification
AgencyLand is tailored to each agency, co-branded with each company's logo, and dotted with pictures of agency heads and customized content. Agency management tracks individual employees' progress, and quizzes are offered at the end of each course.

The user interface as it stands now is Google-esque -- simple, tons of white space, no bells and whistles -- and the content is very Google-centric. Courses suggested for TV media buyers and planners, for example, are "How YouTube complements Television Advertising" and "Getting the Most Out of Google TV." For search specialists, "Google Maps and Ads" and "AdWords on the Go: Mobile Activation." Google is working toward embedding a certification program.

"There's no question the content is largely skewed to our platforms, today, but that's because we are in early stages," Mr. Spinnell said. "AgencyLand ... will expand and include the agency's own training materials and competitive materials."

"Google really has turned around; they really want to help agencies," said Amy Auerbach, senior VP-director of digital at Interpublic Group of Cos.' Initiative, New York. "One of the challenges that agencies face on a daily basis is training staff. Some agencies have established programs and some do not, and that was something that we in the digital space were kind of clamoring for."

Initiative has historically offered a mix of training programs that are informal, such as its "lunch and learn" sessions, where experts give presentations, or more formal, such as a mandatory, nationwide digital training session the shop held earlier this year. "The good thing about AgencyLand is that it's a technology platform, so it was very turnkey for us," Ms. Auerbach said.

Internal affairs
Still, agency leaders are quick to note that Google's agency training program doesn't trump internal ones, and should be used only in tandem with existing training programs.

Last fall, WPP-owned Group M introduced its first major online training program, dubbed Mspace -- a play on the name and style of News Corp.'s MySpace. More than half of the agency's staff -- some 1,700 staffers -- has already gone through the program, and "75% of those people have been people outside of digital," said John Montgomery, chief operating officer-North America at Group M Interaction.

Group M, one of AgencyLand's select test agencies, is in the midst of assembling teams that will work on the platform in beta and report back to the search giant.

"Even something like Mspace has to be used as an adjunct to a formal digital training program, for digital and for nondigital people," Mr. Montgomery said. "If it was their only training I would be worried, and the same would be true about AgencyLand."

Microsoft is launching its own agency-targeted training program this summer, called Digital Academy. It's not an online training tool like Google's but rather in-person educational sessions, expected to push the three-screen approach (web, TV and mobile) that Microsoft evangelizes.

Official Source