Chapter 2 of this Google Ads Guide is about the campaigns tab, we will also cover off some of the ways to display information on this tab. One helpful feature is just below the campaigns button, it is a drop-down feature which allows you to select one of three options. The first is “all campaigns”, the second is “all enabled” and the third is “all but removed”.
Over time your Google Ads account will likely have many campaigns created, this feature can be very helpful when you have multiple campaigns – some removed, some paused and some active. At first, if you have a new account this will not be relevant, but it is worth remembering for the future.
To create a campaign, simply click the + campaign button:
This will allow you to choose from many different types of campaigns. Although this particular activity is for a future chapter. There is and inbuilt graph within Google Ads which is very handy when looking at trends within your account. You can change what the graph shows by clicking on the drop-down options.
If you do not want to see the graph, you can temporarily remove it by clicking on the button to the right of the columns drop-down. The data can be shown by day, week, month and quarter. This is very helpful if you have a lot of data in your account.
There is various things you can track in the graph and it is well worth exploring, an example might be the average position of your ads over a period of time. If it is gradually increasing (negative), you may need to increase bids, or work on the relevance of your keywords, ads or landing page.
The segment button to the right of the “all campaigns” drop-down allows you to split your campaigns data, from what you select.
An example of this might be if you click “segments” and then select “device”, you will be able to see in your campaigns a drop-down of the various devices and their activity. This is very useful to know as the various devices will perform differently and you can bid accordingly.
The filter option is a very useful feature when optimising your campaigns. You can tell Google Ads to show only campaigns with a specific criteria, for example only show campaigns with a particular cost. This will immediately break down all the campaigns and only show campaigns which meet the criteria you have set.
Underneath the new campaign button (the red button) you will see column headers, the information within these headers will be very useful to you when tracking the success of your campaign:
But the default layout may not show you everything you need to see. There is a drop-down option to the right of the filter button called columns. Within this drop-down you can choose what you would like to display on the interface.
When you select modify columns, you will have lots of options that you can display, many of these options are needed, but often not all at the same time, so knowing where to update this will be useful when you are working on your account.
You can also sort the data by clicking on the column headers, this will then sort your campaigns by the header you clicked on.
A common example of this is clicking on the conversions header. The result of this will mean the campaigns with the most conversions would be brought to the top and the campaigns with the least conversions would be sent to the bottom.
To the right of the Graph toggle button, there is an arrow pointing down, this allows you to download the data within the campaign tab. Often you need to download data either for reports for your business, or to look out for trends and here is one of the ways you can do it.
To the right of the arrow is a search feature, which allows you to search for campaigns named in a particular way. This is useful when you only want to show campaigns with a particular campaign name e.g only show campaigns with the word “shopping” in them.
To the right of the new campaign button, there is a drop-down “edit” button, the most frequent reason to use this button, is to pause or enable campaigns, or to copy and paste them. You will first have to tick a box to the left of the campaign before using this function.
To the right of the edit button is the “details” drop-down option. At campaign level, the only option we have here is the “auction insights” feature of Google Ads. This allows you to see how your campaign has performed relative to your competitors. This auction insights feature will give you the list of websites also competing on the terms that you are and how are you compared to them statistically in search.
To the right of the details button, is the “bid strategy” drop-down button, usually this is accessed via the settings tab, which we will cover in a later chapter. To the right of the bid strategy button is the “automated” drop-down, which allows you to create automatic rules that will be implemented without any manual input from you. A simple example of this is, you can create a rule which pauses a campaign on a particular date without you having to go in and do it.
To the right of the automated button is the labels drop down. You can create labels and apply them to campaigns so that you can see how categories of campaigns are performing. A regular use of this feature might be applying a label for branded campaigns versus non brand campaigns and once you have applied these labels, you’ll be able to see how the collective campaigns are performing against each other.
You can also set campaign budgets by clicking on the “per day budget” for each campaign and entering a new one, however this can also be done in the settings tab when you first create your campaign.
Lastly, one of the most frequent tools used within the campaign tab is sorting the timeframe, this is located in the top right-hand corner of Google Ads and once you click it, you will have the option to sort the date in various ways. These options are: today, yesterday, this week, last seven days, last week, last business week, last 14 days, this month, last 30 days, last month and all time.
Depending on the date you pick will depend on what data is shown – when using data, having a big enough sample size is very important and an example might show the last seven days of your campaign performing poorly, however when you look in the last 30 days, you might find that the campaign is performing very well, so be sure to examine this carefully before making changes to your campaign.
A useful tool within this timeframe option is the compare feature. Once this is selected, it will give you the option to compare the data to a previous time frame, so if you are looking at the last 30 days, you can compare it to the previous 30 days. This will then edit all the information in your campaign data and you will see how different parts of your campaign are performing relative to the previous month.
Although there is a lot to digest in the second chapter, a lot of these principles can be used in the other tabs, so getting to grips with some of these buttons will help you when looking at other parts of the account.