Google AdWords Reporting and Analysis

Google AdWords is the most popular online advertising avenue for most businesses. It is important to analyze the investment made and the returns achieved on any marketing campaign to measure its success and to apply necessary refinements to get the maximum returns for the money invested. The same applies for Google AdWords campaigns.

Unfortunately, although Google AdWords has been the most popular online advertising avenue, there is a lack of powerful adwords reporting and analysis tools to analyze the effectiveness of your Google AdWords campaigns. Inbuilt reports and tools offered by Google AdWords lack flexibility and the necessary features required. With Google AdWords being the lifeblood of many businesses, understanding the money invested, the returns realized and refinements required to effectively capitalize on this marketing investment is very critical and essential.

Google AdWords Reporting and Performance Analysis using Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics with its powerful and easy to use on-demand reporting and analysis features can really help you in this regard. You can analyze your Google AdWords account's performance easily with Zoho Analytics and get useful insights in no time. This page explains how you can use Zoho Analytics to generate reports for analyzing your Google AdWords Campaigns' and Ad Groups' performance.

Zoho Analytics provides default templates - "Google AdWords Campaign Performance Analysis" and "Google AdWords Ad Groups Performance Analysis" - for analyzing your / your clients' Google AdWords account Campaigns and Ad Groups performance respectively. These templates provide insightful reports that enable you to easily analyze the performance of your Google AdWords Campaigns. You can also create your own reports for further analysis.

Sample Reporting Databases with the same names are also available for your reference. You can also create a copy of the sample database and play with the sample data provided.

In the following sections, we will go through the step-by-step instructions on how to use the Zoho Analytics templates for your own Google AdWords Campaign/Ad Groups analysis.

Getting Data from Google AdWords

  • Login to your Google AdWords account
  • Select the "Campaigns" tab (or the "Ad groups" tab for ad groups performance analysis)
  • Select the appropriate date range for which data is to be analyzed, from the top-right corner
  • Click on "Columns" and choose the columns to be imported
  • Recommended columns for selection: Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Avg CPC, Avg CPM, Cost, Avg Position, Conversions, Cost / Conversion. You can also select any additional columns if required
  • Click on "Save" button
  • Click on "Download report" icon. "Download and schedule report" section opens inline
  • Choose an appropriate "Report name". Choose the "Format" as ".csv"
  • Click on "Add segment" link and choose the "Day" option
  • You can click on "Email and schedule report" and have it emailed to you too
  • Click on "Create" button
  • Save the generated report in your local folder
  • Modify the CSV data as below:
    • Open the exported CSV file in Excel or any other text editor
    • Delete all extra rows above the column names as well as the summary statistics rows at the bottom.
    • Save the file
  • You can also refer to the below pages in "Google AdWords Help"
    • How do I customize the data in my tables and reports?
    • Campaign report
    • Ad group report

Importing and Analyzing the AdWords data in Zoho Analytics

  • Login to Zoho Analytics
  • Choose "Create Database from Template"
  • Provide the Reporting Database name and description
  • Choose the appropriate template
    • "Google AdWords Campaign Performance Analysis" for campaign-level analysis OR
    • "Google AdWords Ad Groups Performance Analysis" for ad groups-level analysis
  • Uncheck "Populate with Sample Data". Choose to populate with sample data if you would like to review the features in this reporting database with sample data, before you use the same for your own AdWords data analysis.
  • "Create" the reporting database
  • Select the appropriate table
    • "Campaign Performance" OR
    • "Ad Groups Performance"
  • Click on "Import" -> "Import into this table" option
  • Choose "Add at the End" option. (You can keep adding/appending new AdWords data periodically with this option)
  • Select file type as "Comma Separated Value"
  • Browse and load the Google AdWords CSV data file from the "Local Drive"
  • Click "Next"
  • Verify the Date format and the default Column mapping shown under the "Preview" table. Column mapping should not require any modification.
  • Click "Create"

Your AdWords data would get imported into Zoho Analytics. Click on any of the default reports created to analyze the AdWords data imported.

Important points to note on using the database created:

  • Currently, templates provided are only for analyzing at the Campaign & Ad Group levels. We will be adding templates for analyzing the performance of keywords, ads etc. in the future
  • Sample reporting databases created with these templates are available at "Google AdWords Campaign Performance Analysis" and "Google AdWords Ad Groups Performance Analysis".
  • For a quick & overall visualization, dashboards too have been created - Campaigns Analysis Dashboard and Ad Groups Analysis Dashboard.
  • All the default reports have been created for analyzing the sample data of a fictitious Mountain Bike Company. These reports will look relevant only when you populate the template database with Sample Data while creation. You can delete these reports if you do not require them.
  • You can review the default reports design or modify it by clicking "Edit Design" toolbar option in each report
  • You can create a new report to analyze your AdWords data, by clicking the "New Report" option on the top left corner OR by choosing the "Campaign Performance"or "Ad Groups Performance" table and selecting the appropriate report type (Chart, Pivot, Summary, Tabular) listed under the "New" Menu in the toolbar.
  • The templates provided help you to jumpstart your Google AdWords reporting and campaign/ad groups' performance analysis. You can very well create your own database (need not be from the templates provided) for analyzing your AdWords data.

For any queries or clarifications: