This is the final post in our series on creating and analyzing Google Ads (AdWords) ads. In the previous installments we’ve covered:
This post will focus on analyzing the AdWords ads you’ve created.
If you’re looking to evaluate the performance of your ads, an obvious first step is to take a look within the Google Ads interface to see how ads are performing. Here you can do things like customize date ranges, look at cost, click, impression, and conversion data, and quickly make changes to your ads:
This is a very useful view and interface if you’re optimizing ads on an ad group by ad group basis. For smaller campaigns, this really may be all you need for measuring ad peformance. You can quickly glimpse:
You want to be sure to take Quality Score and strong click-through rates into account, but of course the main driver behind your decision on which ads to designate as winners and losers should be conversions and profitability.
The trouble with the Google Ads interface is mainly scale. I can compare these metrics, then pause the ads that didn’t win, then create new ad copies. The problem is if I have a larger account I may have to do this across hundreds or thousands of ad groups. This means I need to be able to analyze and edit multiple ads at once.
One helpful feature here is to set up a filter based on ad text performance data. You can find the Filter menu in the Ads tab:
This can help you cut through some of the noisier data to find out things like which ads have a cost per conversion that’s unprofitable, which have particularly low click-through rates, etc., if you’re analyzing data across a large number of ads.
Finally, within the interface you can also use Google Ads Campaign Experiments for ad copy testing.
Google Ads Editor is a free desktop application offered by AdWords specifically to help to advertisers handle “bulk edits.” Within Google Ads Editor you can quickly make bulk changes to ads (for instance, if you need to move the landing page your ads are driving to, you can quickly change several ad destination URLs at once) but Google Ads Editor doesn’t offer a view of actual ad text performance.
The single most popular tool for analyzing ad text data among PPC advertisers who manage large-scale campaigns is Excel. Excel allows you to make bulk edits and leverage advanced formulas to slice and dice your data, as well as activating and pausing ads and even altering ad creative in bulk.
There are a lot of ways to test, analyze and optimize ads in Excel. Below you’ll find a collection of great resources for analyzing AdWords ads in Excel. Many of these were created by our friend Chad Summerhill and Richard Fergie, who seem to be far and away the most active creators of ad analysis content, but if you know of additional posts or articles we missed, please leave them in the comments.
By leveraging the resources below, you’ll be able to get a lot of great insight into large sets of ads using Excel:
Comments
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.