Google Adwords Dashboards

Click to enlarge.

If you currently have a Google Analytics account, you should have noticed that a new dashboard (like the one on the left) appeared earlier this week. While it all looks very grand, I actually think that you will want to go in and remove or edit a lot of the default reports that are spewed out at you.

Dashboards can of course be very useful (we’ve based our CRM product around one), but you also have to be careful about how much information you have on them, and what information you want to display. A good dashboard should:

  • Allow you to explore your key metrics, by requiring you to move no more than one click from the dashboard. Once you are moving more than one click away, the dashboard is no longer working effectively.
  • Preferably have just the critical few metrics that you want to measure, as really you’re looking for insights, not information. Do I need to see a list of non-active Ad Groups and keywords every time I log in to Adwords? No. Are they providing me with any insights about the current performance of my campaigns, and how I can make them more effective? No. Are they cluttering up my desktop, making it harder to figure out what’s going on? Yes.
  • Not spew out information at you (see point above). Try to tie your chosen metrics to your key business drivers. So for adwords, choose metrics (such as impressions and clicks) that you can relate to conversions – actions on your website that are providing value to your business.
  • Allow you to create multiple versions of a dashboard for different users (for CRM, this is so important). The people that login to our Adwords account for example, are myself and other members of our marketing team, and our finance team (so when we get an invoice from Google, we can check we actually had those clicks in the first place). It would be nice then to have separate marketing and an accounts dashboards; a marketing one that I can customise to show me how my campaigns are performing based on conversions, and an accounts one that shows how many clicks we had in the last month, how much we paid for them, and from what campaigns. And nothing else.

Summary – if you’re an Adwords user it’s time to get your hands dirty, and setup your dashboard to show only the reports that will provide you with quick insights based on your most important metrics.

P.S. If you’d like us to show you how a CRM dashboard can be customised to your particular reporting requirements, why not give us a call on 01494 486301?

P.P.S. We’ve also been experimenting using Adwords Campaign Experiments (ACE), which I’ll write about next time. ACE allows you to create controlled experiments on almost any part of your adwords account; if you spend any meaningful amount of money on Adwords at the moment I highly recommend checking out Google’s free ACE videos.

About the author:  Rob Drummond is a marketing communications specialist at ProspectSoft. Read more from this author