Here’s our very special March update, which we’ve dedicated to our ever-evolving Performance Report.

Yes, we admit we get excited about our Performance Report, as it’s one of our most popular features. And that’s more than likely because the updates we implement are suggested by our test cohorts of PPC specialists. 

This means it’s evolved into a really useful and valuable resource, with more accurate reporting and a growing list of easy-to-implement recommendations.

This year, it’s been our focus to further improve the interface and user experience, to make it easier to understand at a glance, and more importantly, to reduce the time it takes to action the recommendations.

Read on to see what improvements we’ve made:

1. Recommendations are now linked to Opportunities

Previously, we suggested recommendations on how to improve your account but didn’t offer a shortcut for you to action it easily. You had to go off and do it all yourself.

Now, when you are presented with a recommendation, such as “Utilise Sitelinks Extension”, you can simply click ‘Apply Opportunity’. This will send you immediately to that specific opportunity under the Opportunities tab, where you can read the details before applying it to your campaign.  

This upgraded functionality means that you can apply recommendations in fewer clicks, to make improvements to your campaigns much faster.

2. Improved Report Accuracy

Hundreds of small factors all lead to how your Performance Report is calculated and what your end score will be. This means even small changes in extensions or large changes like pausing and unpausing campaigns can have a significant impact on how you could improve and the suggestions we present to you.

To ensure the score is as accurate as possible we take a snapshot of your account at the start of the week and base our analysis of this state, if you make changes after this point they won’t immediately affect your score until the report is run again the following week. You will find however the report recognizes these updates though and will usually display a message to say it’s detected score changes incoming.

3. New Filter Options

Campaign decisions are not often based on a single data point. Whether your aim is to improve your campaign performance, better your account structure or check to see if you’ve had any disapproved ads, you can use the filters on the performance report to narrow down the recommendations to surface the most relevant results.

We’ve added more filters to the report to make finding relevant recommendations even easier, here’s a run down of what each filter shows:

• Account Structure: A well-structured account will result in your ads being triggered to your relevant audience, higher quality scores (meaning lower costs and better results), and helps keep you organized so you can optimize more effectively. If your account is a mess then it’s likely your results will suffer too. 
• Best Practice: Google and Microsoft dominate the search engine market share and if you want to create ads that make a serious impact by maximizing every penny, there are lots of easy-to-implement best practices you can setup.
• Creative: Throwing together some copy for an ad and hoping customers will find you with minimal effort is likely going to result in poor traffic and wasted budget. Instead, use the creative filter to easily identify ways you can make your campaigns more effective at driving clicks and results.
• Disapproval: Ads are disapproved because they don’t comply with one or more of Google or Microsoft’s advertising policies. Although frustrating they are not uncommon, as ads go through an automated review process, which doesn’t think through context like a person would. The good news is that many ad disapprovals are quick to fix so you can get them running again ASAP!
• Performance: A crucial part of managing a successful PPC campaign is to consistently monitor and analyze the performance of your ads so that you can react and optimize. No matter the size of your business, a thorough analysis of your performance and recommendations on where to make improvements can boost your marketing efforts. 
• Reach: There are certain strategies that you can use to maximize your reach with Google Ads, which will lead to an increase in the number of people who click on your ads and convert, making them more effective. 
• Tracking & Measurement: Setting up tracking to effectively measure your online sales, app downloads/installs, newsletter subscribers etc is an important starting point. Beyond that, you can then start to think about calculating conversion value or enabling enhanced conversions in order to understand and optimize your campaigns to their fullest potential.

4. Recommendations based on Impact

To ensure you get even better results, we’ve enhanced our Impact mechanic for grading the recommendations highlighted in the report.

Impact helps you determine how important a recommendation is in comparison to the other recommendations. So it’s now as simple as the bigger something’s impact score is, the more important it is. 

You can identify the significance of recommendations by looking out for the following icons:

• High Impact recommendations are the things that need your attention the most. They are either change that will have the largest, most lasting impact on your performance and optimization or they are issues prevalent across large areas of your account. As you resolve recommendations you may find they drop in priority.

• Mid Impact are next on your list for improvements after the High Impact recommendations. They are fixes that will give you a boost to performance or issues affecting a moderate area of your account. Try and tidy them up for better account optimization and improved performance.

• Low Impact means you’re generally doing well in these areas but there’s a little room for improvement! You may find you’ve got the odd ad group or campaign not following best practices or some minor configuration we believe can be improved. Remember that your individual circumstance may prevent you from scoring exactly 100%.

• Completed, if you see a green tick that means you’ve 100% covered this recommendation! We haven’t got any more advice in this area but ensure to check back and ensure you’re staying at 100% where possible. 

Try it for yourself

Now you can see all the work we’ve put into our Performance Report, it’s time for you to get improved results out of it!

Try our new performance report for free today and see the difference it can make to your advertising campaigns.

If you have questions about any of the new opportunities, contact us at help@adzooma.com and we’ll get you the answers you need.