Measuring
Google Ad results

Learn Google Ads in five steps

Step four - measurement

Once your ads are running, Google Ads interface (and Ads Editor) has built-in statistics which provide an overview of CPC, CTR, conversions etc across all campaigns, ad groups (including keywords) and ads. When reviewing performance, try to isolate audiences and data as much as possible so you can have a clear idea of what is causing an ad to perform well or poorly.

To create reports covering both live and historical campaigns, you can navigate to the ‘reporting’ tab via the top menu. Reports can be customised based on different metrics and results.

You can also view predefined reports across various categories.

Google Analytics can also be used to report on Google Ads campaigns and can provide a summary of performance over time. You can also view the affinity and in-market audience categories traffic users are in when they visit your site.

Google Data Studio also provides reporting options through various templates and dashboards.

Resource

Data Studio templates

Google

Optimisation score

Within the recommendations page of the Ads interface, you can view your Optimisation Score. This score describes how well your Google Ads are set to perform.

The score runs from 0% to 100% with 100% meaning your account can run at full potential. The score doesn’t actually need to be at 100% – some recommendations (such as Smart Bidding, additional keywords etc) won’t be suitable for certain campaigns (but you may decide to test to see possible results).

Google will use its AI system to determine any optimisations which may help your account. However, Google doesn’t know your customers or ad/sales performance as well as you. Some recommendations may suggest choosing a ‘maximise conversions’ bid strategy but prior testing may have taught you this will result in lower quality conversion leads.

Tip

Don’t feel the need to implement every suggested change Google provides, only act based on knowledge gained from testing and your own experience.

Caution

It's important to remember ‘Google recommended changes’ auto implement after 14 days unless disabled so ensure you change these settings under the Recommendations page.

Impression share

Impression share is the number of times your ad was shown for relevant searches versus how many times they were missing (i.e. how frequently ads are showing for people who are using relevant keywords). Google caps the number of impressions your ad can show for (for relevant search terms). The better your quality score, the more impression share Google allows.

If your quality score is already 10/10, the only way to improve impression share is to increase your max CPC/bids. This is shown in the Keyword Planner forecasting tool which provides a graph/curve of expected clicks at different CPC levels (e.g. $0.60 per click = 19,000 clicks whilst $4.10 CPC = 60,000 clicks). This means CPA will increase when the number of clicks are increased.

Video

Google Ads Auction Insights report

Paid Media Pros

Attribution reporting:

The Attribution Report shows how many ads people see and steps they take before making a conversion. Reports will also show how many days it took for a conversion to be completed, how many ad clicks it took, device type etc.

Messages once campaigns are live:

Once a campaign is live, you may see a message ‘Below First Page Bid’. This indicates the bid for a selected keyword is too low (relative to competitors) to show your ad on the first page of Google search.

If a ‘Limited by Budget’ message appears, this is an indication the campaign budget is lower than the recommended daily budget. This will result in ads not showing to their full potential due to an exhausted budget.

Whilst bids may be suitable for keywords, another possible warning message is ‘Low Search Volume’. This indicates the keywords have few impressions (i.e. people aren’t searching for them enough to trigger ads). This may not be a huge issue as, whilst only a few people may be searching, the ads can still result in conversions.

This concludes step four of learning Google Ads (measurement). In step five (improving campaign results), we’ll cover how to use a negative keyword list to help ensure only highly relevant interested traffic arrives at your website. Learn how to improve your quality score to achieve lower costs and greater ad performance. Find out how other, seemingly unrelated channels, can help improve the performance of your Google Ads campaigns.