Awarded at Toronto "Ultra Advanced SEO Symposium" Nov. 2005.

WIN with Google Adwords ... How To Read Google Adgroup reports

The success of an Adgroup within a Google Adwords campaign (a campaign is in simple terms a collection of Adgroups) is best judged by looking at 3 things primarily

Number of clicks since this determines an overall degree of effectiveness ... each click is a potential sale or at least an opportunity for an MWR (Most Wanted Response). An MWR could be the collection of an email address or a subscription to a newsletter not necessarily a sale. But for the rest of this exercise I will treat MWR = SALE

CTR ... Probably the biggest "missed trick" of any Google Ads campaign and the most difficult to get right. The higher the CTR the better since this impacts significantly upon amount paid per click to rank in any position. For example if you are paying on average 34 cents per click for an average position of 2.4 it is quite possible that a competitor could be paying 45 cents for an average position of 4 or even lower. This is a big advantage of Google Adwords ... they reward good search engine optimization skills (in the end Google want to make money and they make money on high CTR's)

The average position within the Ads skyscraper. If you are not in top 5 positions then chances of being seen (let alone clicked on) are dramatically reduced. reason is simple ... people do not like to scroll down the page. Top 5 positions generally show on most present day monitors

Ad Group Column

Any campaign needs numerous Ad Groups to be able to maintain a degree of control and take advantage of optimization skills ... you would normally see for each Adgroup a different average click value and a different average position. Each grouping should contain a logically organized list of keywords

Impressions Column

This is simply the number of times your ad has appeared upon a SERP (search engine results page). Clearly if your ad is not on page 1 (i.e. in top 8 positions) then impressions will drop significantly.

Clicks Column

Everytime somebody clicks on your ad no matter where it is in the rankings you pay for that click.

CTR Column ... Click Through Ratio

This is ratio between actual clicks and impressions and is very important

Avg CPC Column ... Cost Per Click

This is ratio between total cost and actual clicks.

Avg Position Column

This changes throughout day as new bids come in and CTR's change dynamically and is another reason why Google Ads must be managed to avoid

over-spending and

losing position

Example from one of our UK managed campaigns

To give an idea of relative importance of CTR to CPC take this example of an actual campaign after a few days ...

Adgroups ... 32

Impressions ... 19,873

Clicks ... 1,256. Between 0 and 654 depending on Adgroup

CTR ... between 0 and 33% with average weighted at 6.3%

Avg CPC ... between $0.00 and $0.56 with an average of $0.33

Total cost ... $408.46

Avg Position ... between 1 and 9.6 with average 2.5

The challenge of the Adgroup campaign manager is to improve all these ratios in favour of the client ... that's what we do. Ring Tony Roocroft at 011-454-0105

Learn more about CTR click through rate

Learn about CPC cost per click

Learn about position

How to know your daily ROI

We are ethical South African search engine optimization practitioners based in Johannesburg, Gauteng. Internet marketing efforts in South Africa are still in their infancy. Search engine marketing and search engine positioning is built around 3 basic concepts - organic search engine optimization, optimizing for PPC (pay per click) campaigns and site functionality. All three areas must work together to succeed.