How Excel Can Improve Your Google Adwords Campaigns
6 min read | Bid Management
Having worked in both search and digital marketing for quite a number of years now, I’ve used dozens of different bid management tools and programs that were rumoured to be the Holy Grail to a profitable search campaign. The procedure was easy: simply enter your campaign targets, let the algorithms get to work, and soon, they solve all your problems… only, they wouldn’t. I always found that getting your hands dirty and sifting through the data yourself delivered better results.
The major problem people have, however, is not knowing how to organise their data into meaningful reports that will help to optimise their campaigns. So, the question remains: how do we do it? The answer is simple; Excel. I could go on for hours about how much I love Excel, but instead, I’ll show you three reports you can start using right now to improve performance, instantly.
Comparing Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly or Yearly Performance
When running a large SEM account, it’s easy to look at an overview and tell if performance has dropped significantly on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. The problem, however, with only looking at an account level is that you can easily miss a large drop for a single keyword or adgroup.
Zoning into your account at these levels will achieve two things: 1. You will be able to diagnose any potential account problems at an early stage, and 2. You will be able to make continual, long-term improvements to your account.
Although Adwords recently introduced a comparison tool to their interface, it still doesn’t provide enough flexibility in comparison periods. For some, it can also be harder to sort through large data sets using the AdWords interface. So, at Flight Digital, we run custom reports to find changes in our adgroup and keyword performance.
The report above shows us the +/- and % change of clicks, impressions, costs, conversions, and revenue for any 2 periods we want to compare. The conditional formatting also allows us to see if any adgroup has had a change of more than 25% in either direction. We can now easily identify if something is out of the ordinary and investigate why there was such a large change, such as drop in quality score, increase in competition etc.
If you don’t look at this data on a regular basis you are putting your account performance at risk, and the longer the problems go on, the harder they can become to fix.
Regular Bid Optimisations to Increase Return on Ad Spend
We’ve seen a lot of advertisers fall in love with their three or four top performing keywords and forget to optimise those that might have lower search volumes. Running an account this way will most definitely stop your account from reaching its maximum potential.
On the other hand, others will allow bid optimisation tools to do their bidding automatically, but this can result in losing impressions and watching traffic drop. And the worst of all of these are accounts where no one has been making any bid changes! The problem with this is the fact that AdWords is run on a live auction. This means that bids, AdRank, and Quality Scores are constantly changing, which will have an effect on your campaign goals.
To keep on top of this, you should run keyword reports once or twice throughout the week to look at the current state of each keyword’s CPA.
By running a simple keyword report and creating a new column for profit/loss, you can easily filter keywords with large losses, high profit margins, and ones that are breaking even. This data should be used to make decisions on whether a keyword bid needs to be increased or decreased.
Here, we’ve filtered any keyword that has a loss of $50+. We can tell that it has lost money because it has delivered zero conversions. We can also see that most of these keywords have an average position of 1.9 or higher. Next, we would then look over a longer time period to see if the keyword has consistently performed poorly, or if it is just a slow week/month. If it is a consistently poor performer we can reduce the bid or pause the keyword.
If you decide to reduce the bid, you can create a new column and name it ‘New CPC’. We can then do a bulk upload into adwords editor with all of our adjusted bids. This will save you time from having to do it manually in the adwords interface.
We can then filter keywords that have performed well and delivered strong revenue numbers. Once we have this list, we can look through to find keywords with a low average position and then check if they have the potential to increase the bids and traffic without having too much of an impact on ROI.
Below, we have identified keywords that meet the above criteria and proceeded to increase the bids on keywords with an average position below 2.2. If you are doing this regularly, it is important that you always use the data after you made the last set of bid changes. This will give you time to see how it performs at a higher/lower CPC and average position.
Finding Your Best Performing Geo Location
Google allows you to see how your location targeting is working by going into the Location Settings of your account. We often see advertisers targeting the whole of Australia, which stops them from being able to see a performance breakdown of each state or city.
The work around this issue is easy. You simply need to open the dimensions tab, change your view to Geographic, and you will be able to see the performance from each region. But, if you have multiple campaigns running, you won’t be able to see an overall performance for each region. To work around this, you can simply download this report and create a pivot or a “sum if” table to break out the data:
Now that we have grouped all the data for each state, we can clearly see that NSW and NT are the best performing states, and that ACT, QLD, and SA have the highest CPA. The best thing to do from here is to split out the location targeting in our campaign settings. Then, we can make bid adjustments for each state, according to how well they perform. This will help you refine your campaign and improve your ROI.
There are plenty of other ways to use Excel to report on Quality Score, Ad Testing, Landing Page tests etc. We’ll touch on them soon, but for now, implement these tips and we’re sure you’ll see instant improvement on your AdWords campaigns.
