On the Google Grants team, we receive a lot of questions from grantees on how best to evaluate their AdWords performance. We put this article together to give guidance around monitoring and evaluating your Google Grants account using a few strategies we find valuable. We hope you do, too!

 

In general, you should use the data that flows into your AdWords account to evaluate performance. Regularly review account statistics for your campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords. Create and analyze reports on your performance in the Reports Center. In addition, consider setting up AdWords Conversion Tracking or better yet, implement Google Analytics with AdWords to understand the entire visitor experience from keyword search to ad click to their ultimate actions on your site.

 

When reviewing performance statistics in your account or within reports, identify problem areas (whether they be individual keywords or ads or even entire campaigns or ad groups). These problem areas can be identified by poor quality score, low clickthrough rate (CTR), low impression volume, poor ad position, high cost-per-conversion, and more. (Don't worry, we'll go into detail on a few of these problem areas and how to identify them below!) Once you know what is not working, use our optimization strategies to improve performance and/or consider deleting what just doesn't work.

Now that you have a basic idea of how to evaluate performance, take 10 minutes to set up a monthly keyword report. By devoting some time each month to review it, you can evaluate performance and manage your account quickly and with much less effort.

Note that we have recently asked our grantees to more actively manage their accounts. The strategy below is a great way to meet this new requirement. You'll know what a Keyword Performance Report is and how to set one up so that it's automatically delivered to your inbox on a monthly basis. More importantly, you'll know how to leverage this report to evaluate and manage your account quickly and effectively.

Let's get started.

The Keyword Performance Report

Keyword Performance reports let you view statistics on how your keywords are performing across all campaigns. You can schedule reports to be automatically emailed to you on a monthly (or weekly) basis.

To schedule a Keyword Performance Report, first log in to your account and click the Reports tab. Then follow the instructions in the AdWords Help Center entry on scheduling Keyword Performance Reports. When scheduling the report, please note two crucial details:

• In the "Advanced Settings - Filter Your Results" section, you want to click the check box to "Include keywords with zero impressions."
• In the "Templates, Scheduling, and Email" section, make sure to click the check box for "Save this as a new report template" and then schedule the report to run automatically. Also remember to enter your email address!

• Keywords that are too broad. It is likely that your terms are too broad. For example, the keyword 'donate' is likely too broad for any campaign. It helps to make these keywords more specific by adding more descriptive language to the term. If you run an AIDS research nonprofit, for example, you may want to use the term, 'donate aids research.'

• Keywords that are too loosely related to the ad text or not related at all. If you notice that your keyword does not directly relate to your ad text, you might want to consider moving this keyword to a more relevant ad group. Or, if you determine that this keyword is unrelated to your campaign as a whole, you can pause or delete this keyword.

For keywords with a relatively high CTR, you can use the Keyword Tool to generate variations and expansions of these high performers. You will want to continually re-evaluate your terms to weed out the keywords that are not driving traffic to your site and to expand upon those terms that are bringing more support to your non-profit.

Impressions

Lastly, sort the Impression column so that it is in descending order. Impressions refer to the number of times your ad has shown on Google.

What to do:

 

For this data metric, pay particular attention to the keywords that are receiving very few or zero impressions. When observing these low traffic keywords, look to see what the keywords have in common: Mostly likely, these keywords will be too specific. You can approach this issue from a few angles:

• Use a shorter variation of the term. For example, a term like "free after school programs to help my child succeed" could be shortened to "free after school programs"
• Use the popular terms more. As a specialist in a given field of interest, it's easy fall into the trap of using very niche terms. For example, if you are running a foundation to help save the manta ray population, Manta Birostris (the scientific term for manta rays) might seem like a common term to you, yet this term may not be used very much by the general public. You will want to make sure to use terms that would be known and recognized by your target audience. If you're unsure, you can use Google Insights for Search to gain some insight into the search volume of the keywords you use.
• Find relevant expansions: Use the Keyword Toolto find expansions of the low traffic keyword. The Keyword Tool will show you overall search volume of the relevant expansions, thus allowing you to find similar, more high traffic terms. Please be sure to exercise caution when adding keywords: In general, it's better to err on the side of being too specific and growing from there than it is to err on the side of being too general -- which can cause larger Quality Score problems.