AnalyticsHow to Get Tons of Great Data From Google AdWords Instantly

How to Get Tons of Great Data From Google AdWords Instantly

The Home screen is an under-utilized element of your AdWords account. Here's how to reorganize in order to get to your data efficiently.

The Forgotten Dashboard

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about managing paid search accounts efficiently. Optimizing pay-per-click accounts requires heaving lifting from analysis, implementation, communication, strategic planning, and the list goes on and on. You need to streamline each process as much as possible in order to be agile, thorough, and productive – and provide stellar results.

Saving time on front-end analysis can help build out your task list for the day and get to making awesome optimizations swiftly. There are numerous tips and tricks to get to data quickly and this article will focus on what I consider an under-utilized element of your AdWords account: the Home screen.

I’ve been polling folks lately and most everyone I’ve asked said they go straight to the “Campaigns” tab within AdWords and dive head-first into a sea of data, campaigns, and everything else that awaits in their account. Most account managers don’t even look at the Home screen.

One Size Fits No One

adwords-campaign-tab

There is a pretty good reason to ignore this section of your AdWords account: it’s not that useful. The Home screen contains template modules including:

adwords-home-screen-modules

None of these modules are all the helpful, and they most certainly aren’t geared toward the core metrics that matter most to your specific campaigns. However, if you take a few minutes to customize the Home screen, this can be an excellent starting point every time you log into your account. Imagine if you clicked on “Home” and it gave you wealth of data and action items? Yes, we can make this dream happen!

Quick Detour for Saved Filters

Let’s take a quick detour off the Home screen for a minute. Trust me, this is necessary.

More than likely you analyze similar stats in your AdWords account every day. You might be looking at cost-per-acquisition or high-volume keywords that need close attention. In AdWords, you can apply filters to acquire the data you need.

One quick way to streamline your filtering process is to create custom filters. Whenever your filter is set up just right, all you need to do is click “Save Filter” at the bottom of the screen. Now, this saved filter will always be here and you don’t need to re-create it every time!

In this example, I wanted to save a keyword filter for terms that have spent more than $35 with less than one conversion (they aren’t doing very well). I created the filter, and then saved it.

adwords-filter

Personalize Your Home Screen

OK! Now, let’s get back to making the Home screen helpful. To personalize your Home screen, just click on “Customize Modules,” at the top of the screen.

adwords-customize-modules

What the heck is a “Module”? It’s a fancy term for saved filter! Now, you can see why we needed to take that quick detour to set up saved filters. Your saved filters will be within the Modules screen when you click on “Customize Modules.” Then you can remove the template modules and replace them with modules that mean something to you.

Below is a Home screen that can provide quick insights. The first module shows keywords that are spending and not converting. The second module shows keywords that have good volume but their ROAS is a bit under goal. And the third module shows keywords that are rocking and could perhaps gain even more exposure.

adwords-keywords-module

And at the bottom of each module, you can click on “View saved filter,” and you can go straight to these keywords in your account and take quick action. Nice!

Summary With Coffee

I envision you logging into your AdWords account, cup of hot coffee in hand, ready to dig in and do some awesome work. And the first thing you do is check out the Home screen and it has a handful of customized modules that display super-relevant data and helps you get to work quickly. Heck, you could even have your analysis and action list built out before you finish that cup of delicious coffee.

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