New Features in Search Funnels

We’ve received very positive feedback from advertisers using Search Funnels—the new set of reports launched in Conversions. Advertisers are beginning to understand the path to conversion beyond just the last click and are now able to give credit to assisting keywords and ads that customers saw and/or clicked before converting. Each buying cycle is different and Search Funnels is eliminating the guesswork over the roles your keywords are playing in the path to conversion.

And here’s the first round of improvements, as requested by you.

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Longer, customizable Conversion History Windows

A buyer may take longer to research and buy a vacation package rather than purchase movie tickets, for example. The funnel for various conversion types can differ greatly in regards to time to purchase and number of clicks to purchase. Now, you can adjust the time span, or Conversion History Window, to 30 days (default), 60 days or 90 days prior to a conversion to see the Search Funnel data leading to that conversion. With this feature, you can look further back into the history of your conversion paths.

Only show complete conversion paths

A percentage of surfers clear cookies from time to time, which can influence search funnels data by causing conversion paths to appear shorter by eliminating some upper funnel assists - impressions or clicks on your keywords - that may have occurred prior to cookie deletion. For instance, if a buyer clicks on one of your ads, then clears cookies, then goes on to click another one or your ads before making a purchase, the click prior to cookie deletion will not show up in your Search Funnels reports.

Now, you can sanitize the search funnel data you’re looking at by checking a box in your reports called “Only show complete conversion paths.” This option will filter out conversions that are from paths that are potentially biased by cookie deletion. As such, while you will end up analyzing fewer conversions overall, you will be seeing truer, more complete conversion paths. Use this option to strengthen your overall funnel analysis and understand how buyers are finding your products.

These new features were created based on feedback we received from Search Funnels users and we hope you find them useful as you experiment with, analyze, and optimize your portfolio of keywords.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

Changes to reporting in My Client Center

For those of you who use My Client Center (MCC) to manage your client accounts, we’re introducing a new interface for the Client Reporting tab. Over the last few months, we’ve developed a new reporting interface to help you get your reports faster, easier, and more securely.

These changes will only affect reporting for MCC users. If you use the AdWords Reports Center in an individual AdWords account, see our earlier post to learn about the reports that have moved to the Campaigns tab.

Key features of the new interface

• No more templates: We’ve removed templates. Each report today can be the basis for a different report. Just click ‘Create Similar’ next to the report, and you’ll create a new report based on the one you just selected.
• Faster report generation: We’ve built new infrastructure that allows you to create complex reports more quickly and easily.
• More reports: We’ve increased the number of reports you can store from 15 to 100. Now you can build many customized reports to meet your unique needs.
• Increased security: To allow you to better control who receives your reports, we’ve changed the level of access for emailed reports. With the new interface, only email addresses that were invited to the account can receive emailed reports. You can modify the access levels by clicking ‘Account Access’ in the My Account tab. Learn more.

To learn more about all of the new features, visit the Help Center.

Migrating from the old interface:

Over the coming weeks, you’ll see a message in the old interface inviting you to switch over and experiment with the new interface. The old interface will still be completely functional, and all of your previous reports will continue to work.

When we start migrating your reports, you’ll be redirected to the new reporting interface when you click on the Client Reporting tab. Once this happens, you’ll be able to see your reports in the old interface, but you won’t be able to create new reports or modify scheduled reports. You’ll also notice that your scheduled reports will be generated twice – in both the old and new interface. You can delete reports from the old interface to stop seeing duplicate reports.

If you send scheduled reports to email recipients, we’ve introduced a way to give you more control over who receives your new reports via email. Only email address invited to the account will be able to receive emailed reports.

At the end of the transition to the new reporting interface we’ll remove the link to the old interface, reports scheduled through the old interface will no longer run, and you’ll need to schedule emailed reports using the new interface.

How to prepare

We recommend experimenting with the new reports available in the Campaigns tab of any individual AdWords account. You can also take a tour of these new reporting tools in the AdWords Online Classroom. Once the new reporting interface is available in your MCC, you can try out the new features and start creating reports. To learn more, visit the Help Center.

To let us know what you think of these changes, click the ‘Send feedback’ link in your account.

Posted by Omry Pruzan, Product Manager, My Client Center

A few updates on reporting in AdWords

If you think AdWords reporting is looking a bit different these days, you’re right! Since we announced some important changes to reporting in late June, we’ve been regularly adding statistics and features into the Campaigns tab that were previously only accessible through the Report Center (with many more additions to come).

At the same time, we’ve begun to move reports out of the Report Center entirely. In fact, new Account, Campaign, and Ad Group reports can no longer be created from the Reports tab. Now that the transition is in full swing, we thought it would be a good time to address the feedback we’ve gotten so far, point out available help resources, and highlight a few new features we’ve recently released.

What we’ve heard from you

We believe that reports can be faster and more powerful in the Campaigns tab. You get the flexibility to quickly switch views when you want to dig deeper into performance trends, and to act on the insights you discover by making changes on the same pages where you run your reports.

That being said, we’ve heard that the changes have created issues for some of you. We’ve gotten feedback that it’s been difficult to find all the reporting features you used to access through the Report Center, and that some statistics and segmentation options aren’t available in every place you’d like to use them.

Your input on this first set of changes has been incredibly helpful, and we’re acting on the feedback we receive. For example, in the next few weeks we plan to add “Total” rows to every report you download from the Campaigns tab, and new options to view overall search network traffic (Google search + search partners). We’ll keep making changes based on your requests, so please continue to send us your thoughts.

Help resources

If you’re having trouble finding a specific statistic or reporting feature in AdWords, we’ve created materials that we think will help you out.

• Download our PDF guide for a handy and comprehensive resource you can consult if you're wondering where to find particular metrics.
• We also have a recorded webinar and extensive FAQs available on a regularly updated page in the AdWords Help Center.

New features

While we’ve focused most of our energies adding Report Center options to the Campaigns tab, we’ve also added some new reporting features to campaign management. In fact, some advanced reporting options are only available in the Campaigns tab, such as segmenting statistics by device and click type. Additionally, you can now use the Dimensions tab to view and segment performance by the dimension of your choice.

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This new reporting feature lets you quickly see reports such as:

• Your campaign statistics segmented by hour of day (answer questions like “how much shopping do my customers do on their lunch break?”)
• Your account statistics segmented by quarter (get an executive summary of how your performance has changed since your account started running)
• Your account statistics segmented by Destination URL (see which pages on your site are getting the most AdWords traffic, or which pages are the most profitable)

Over the coming weeks we’ll add even more reporting functionality to AdWords, and we also plan to continue removing reports from the Report Center as they become supported on the Campaigns tab.

Thank you for all the work you’ve put into the transition already, and for bearing with us throughout this ambitious set of changes. We think you’ll find the new integrated reporting even more valuable once you've had a chance to get used to the changes and the full transition from the Report Center is complete. Until then, please keep letting us know how we’re doing by submitting feedback as any issues arise.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

Improved keyword diagnosis -- no appointments necessary

"Are my ads showing? If they aren't, why not?"

Whether you have ten keywords or ten thousand, making sure your ads are showing is a top priority. Now you can get detailed diagnostic information for multiple keywords at once by using a new keyword diagnosis option on the Keywords tab.

To get started, open the "More actions" menu on your Keywords tab (at the account, campaign, or ad group level) and select "Diagnose keywords."

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On the keyword diagnosis menu, you have all the options available in the standalone Ads Diagnostic Tool. For example, if you're interested in seeing whether or not your ad is showing in a particular location, you can use the Location drop-down to narrow the scope of your diagnosis.

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After clicking "Run test," you'll see the real-time results appear in the Status column next to each keyword. If all is well, you see "Ad showing." If not, you'll see a brief summary of the problem (for example, "Low bid or quality score"):

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To get more details on a keyword's status, hover over any speech bubble icon. In the above example, viewing details for the keyword "meeting icebreakers" displays more information on the Quality Score issues that are preventing the ad from showing. To focus on one issue at a time, try creating filters for Keyword Status.

The next time your keywords need a check-up, try using keyword diagnosis -- it even makes house calls!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

Changes to reporting in AdWords

The Report Center is full of helpful data, but effective campaign management needs to combine insights and control. That's why we’ve moved a number of reports from the Report Center directly into the Campaigns tab.

Now you can use AdWords to see the search terms and automatic placements where your ads appeared, segment your data by things like keyword match type and day of week, and email and schedule downloads of the data you want to share. You can do it all on the same pages where you manage your campaigns, making finding key performance drivers (and acting on your discoveries) faster and easier.

With so much useful data available within the Campaigns tab, the AdWords Report Center is no longer the best place to find new reports. So, in order to build the most useful reporting tools possible, we plan to gradually move the existing reports from the Report Center into the Campaigns tab, then retire the Report Center entirely.

Here’s how the changes will work:

• Over the coming weeks, we’ll move the key elements from every report in the Report Center into the Campaigns tab.
• Whenever a report becomes available in the Campaigns tab, we’ll remove the option to create this type of report in the Report Center.
• Don’t worry, the scheduled reports you’ve set up for this report type will still run as usual. However, we’ll also copy these reports into the “Reports” section of your Control Panel & Library. Once you’re comfortable with the new version of your scheduled reports, you can delete your old reports from the Report Center to avoid receiving duplicate emails with the same AdWords data.
• After we’ve finished moving all report types into the Campaigns tab, we’ll retire the Report Center entirely. You’ll then download, schedule, and email your reports only from the pages where you manage your campaigns.

These changes will only affect the Report Center for individual accounts. My Client Center reports and reports for TV ads won't change with the transition.

So, how should you prepare?

• As a starting point, you can take a tour of reporting tools in the Campaigns tab in the AdWords Online Classroom.
• If you’re an expert Report Center user with questions about how a specific area of reporting will change, you can download our guide to the transition, an extensive PDF with more detailed information.
• Finally, you can check in on the transition in the AdWords Help Center.

If you have any feedback on the changes, please send it our way. Look forward to additional blog posts on new reporting functionality in the near future. And above all, dig into that data!

Posted by Emily Williams, Inside AdWords crew

New AdWords reports in Google Analytics now available to all

Last month we released a major update to the AdWords reports in Google Analytics. Today, we’re making this functionality available to all AdWords advertisers. The new reports give you deeper insight into the performance of your AdWords campaigns.

If you're a fan of the Placement Performance report in AdWords, you should take a look at the Placements report in Google Analytics. The Placements report lets you analyze the visits your site received from ads on the Google Content Network, and it offers more insight and information than the AdWords PPR. You can see the number of visits, the number of conversions, and engagement metrics like bounce rate and time on site.

If you’ve ever wondered how day of the week or time of day affected your ads, you’ll find the Day Parts reports very helpful. With the report, you can see the visits from your ads broken down by hour of day or day of the week. By graphing visits and transactions, you can uncover the times of day when you see more conversions. You can then use ad scheduling to increase your bids during those times.

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In order to use the new reports, you need to link your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts with destination URL auto-tagging turned on. If you haven’t already done this, you can set it up by clicking on the Reporting tab, then Google Analytics. You’ll find the new reports in the Traffic Sources section of your reports.

You can learn more about the reports and see a video of them in action on the Google Ad Innovations page.

Posted by Emily Williams, Inside AdWords crew

Sharing is caring: new ways to segment, schedule, and email reports

When we discover something great, our first impulse is to share it. How else do you explain the 66 million times people have watched a baby panda sneeze? Sharing the insights you find in your AdWords reports should be as easy as forwarding a YouTube link, so we’ve recently released new options for segmenting, scheduling, and emailing the data on your Campaigns tab.

By clicking the Download button in the toolbar above your data tables, you’ll open a menu that shows you a number of options for sharing reports with others.

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First, you’ll name your report, just as you would in the Report Center. Next, you can add segments to reveal different dimensions of your performance. Add multiple segments at once to get a even deeper breakdown of your statistics. For example, you can segment your campaigns by device and day of the week to understand the days when your customers are more likely to see your ad on their mobile devices. Each new segment you add will appear as a separate column in your downloaded report.

From here, you have a few options. You can simply download your report in formats ranging from .CSV to .PDF and personally deliver it to your favorite teammate. Or, you can choose to email your data to one or all of the users with reporting access in your account.

Finally, you’ll set the frequency at which you want this report to run. So if you’ve set up a filter for your keyword list to show, for example, only those keywords containing the term “free” that have cost you over $50 with a conversion rate under 5%, you can now get a weekly email with a report showing you their performance. All the reports you download from the Campaigns tab will appear in your Control Panel and Library, a new area used to manage the reports and custom alerts that you’ve created for your account.

These changes are just the latest in our ongoing efforts to simplify the ways you access your reports. We hope that with more data in the Campaigns tab and easier access to advanced statistics, looking at the different dimensions of your campaign performance becomes common practice. After all, you never know how many baby pandas could be hiding in your campaigns...

Posted by Devin Sandoz, Product Marketing Manager

New AdWords reports in Google Analytics

AdWords provides several ways for you to track the performance of your ads– most of which focus on clicks. Sometimes, however, understanding what happens after people click on your ads is just as important for measuring your AdWords performance. Today at the eMetrics conference in San Jose, we announced a new set of AdWords reports in Google Analytics to help you do exactly that.

The new AdWords reports in Google Analytics give you more insight into what happens after the click. For example, suppose you wanted to see if potential customers searching for your exact matched keywords were more engaged with your site’s content than those who were searching on broader terms. Using the new reports, you can view all the visits from clicks on exact matched ads for any keyword, ad group, or campaign in your account. You can also see how many pages that group visited and the average time spent on site. If you use the funnel reports in Google Analytics, you can even see the specific step where visitors tend to drop off when trying to make a purchase.

Want to see other ways you can use the new reports? Check out this short video:

If you’re ready to use the new reports, you just need to have a linked Google Analytics account with destination URL auto-tagging turned on. This is easy to set up; you can start by clicking on the Reporting tab, and then selecting Google Analytics in your AdWords account.

We’re rolling these new AdWords reports out gradually over the next several weeks, so you may not see them right away. You’ll know when the new reports have been added to your account when you see the AdWords section in your Traffic Sources reports in Google Analytics.

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We hope these reports make it easier for you to measure the success of your AdWords campaigns!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

New Reports: AdWords Search Funnels

In order to help you make more informed decisions about your AdWords keywords, ad groups, and campaigns, we're excited to release a new set of reports for your AdWords account: AdWords Search Funnels (beta). Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad someone clicks before making a conversion, masking the fact that many customers perform multiple searches before finally converting. AdWords Search Funnels help you see the full picture by giving you insight into the ads your customers interact with during their shopping process.

What are AdWords Search Funnels?

AdWords Search Funnels are a set of reports describing the ad click and impression behavior on Google.com that leads up to a conversion. In addition to a Top Conversions report, Search Funnels consist of 7 reports including Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length. For an overview of these new reports, check out this video:

Why are these useful?

"Search Funnel enables us to create a better experience for our customers by helping us understand how they search for our products," said Beth Hirschhorn, Chief Marketing Officer from MetLife, the largest life insurance company based in the United States. "It is an important tool to help de-code consumer shopping habits and thought processes, which we can relate back to our online as well as offline advertising."

By showing which ads your customers clicked on before ultimately converting, Search Funnels give a more complete picture of the value of your keywords, ad groups and campaigns. Let's look at a hypothetical example.

An online vacation service called Flyaway Vacations is running AdWords campaigns for vacation packages in Hawaii. Their ads link to a site where visitors can book any or all parts of a package that includes flights, a hotel, car rental, and surf lessons. Suppose that on March 10 someone searched for "hawaii vacation" and clicked on an ad for Flyaway's Hawaii package. A click was registered in their AdWords account. Then, two days later, the same person searched for "flights to hawaii" and saw another ad for Flyaway, but didn't click. An impression was registered in Flyaway's AdWords account. Finally, three days later, the same person searched one more time, this time for "flyaway hawaii." This time they clicked the ad, visited the site, and purchased the Hawaii vacation package.

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Instead of showing only a purchase conversion for the "flyaway hawaii" keyword, Search Funnels will show an assist click for the keyword "hawaii vacation" and an assist impression for the keyword "flights to hawaii". Testing the value of assist clicks and impressions is important for evaluating and understanding the true value of all of your keywords.

Search Funnels not only help you understand the keywords seen by converters, they also show you those that weren't seen. For example, in the Flyaway campaign, it's possible that another keyword, such as "hawaii surf lessons," didn't contribute any assist clicks or impressions, or last click conversions, indicating that this may be a keyword that's providing little conversion value. Assist information is an additional data point you can use when making strategic budgeting decisions, from the campaign level down to the keyword level.

Search Funnels also show the "Path Length," or average number of clicks and impressions prior to conversion, which can help you understand and target repeat visitors. Additionally they show "Time Lag," or the amount of time it takes a customer to convert after seeing or clicking on your ads for the first time, which can help you determine lead time for seasonal campaigns. These breakdowns can help you understand your customers' behavior and create strategies around that information.

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Over the next few weeks, the Search Funnels beta will be rolled out gradually to all accounts in the 'Conversions' section under the 'Reporting' tab. To activate them, you must either have AdWords Conversion Tracking running or import goals or transactions into AdWords from Google Analytics. Keep in mind that Search Funnels are only available in your AdWords account (not in Google Analytics), and will only show data for keywords that show up in at least one conversion path. Search Funnel data is currently limited to search ads showing on Google.com, for ad impressions and clicks within 30 days of the conversion.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

Streamlined analysis tools in your Campaigns tab

Over the last several months, we've been introducing new ways to analyze and segment your campaign data. As we continue to introduce more data types, we want to make sure that it's easy for you to access these reporting controls. That's why we've introduced a new analysis toolbar in the Campaigns tab of your account. This toolbar consolidates key functionality from the "Filter and views" and "More actions" menus, and appears at the top of each of your data tables:

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You can use the toolbar to quickly apply a filter to the data you're viewing or customize the columns on each tab. You can also gain important insights into performance across different networks or time periods by using the "Segment" option:

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Controls to show or hide paused or deleted campaigns and ad groups are also now available in this toolbar:

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Just like the integration of the popular Search Query and Placement Performance Reports in the Campaigns tab, our hope is that this new toolbar will further streamline reporting and help you to get the most out of your AdWords data and your advertising campaigns.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew