Google AdWords 101: What do all these statistics mean?
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010You’ve gone through the process of setting up AdWords, but there are so many tabs, so much to do, and so many statistics! Here’s a glossary of need-to-know terms.
At the Campaign Level…
AdWords accounts are separated first by campaigns. Depending on how many ad groups you’re running, the need for multiple campaigns may vary. For many of our small business clients, only one campaign is necessary.
- Campaign: The names of the campaigns – so be sure to create more specific names than Campaign 1, Campaign 2, and so on. Click on one to drill down into the ad groups of each.
- Budget: The daily budget set per campaign.
- Status: The state of the Campaign. Google will alert you whether the campaign is paused, deleted, limited by budget, etc.
- Clicks: How many total clicks (including all of its ad groups) the campaign has received.
- Impr.: Impressions. The total number of impressions (how many times your ad appears) for all ad groups in the campaign.
- CTR: Click Through Rate. A percentage of clicks per impressions; again, out of all ad groups in the campaign.
- Avg. CPC: Average Cost Per Click. The number will give you the average amount you pay per click on average for all the ad groups in the campaign.
- Cost: Total amount spent for the entire campaign, based on the date range set.
- Avg. Pos.: Average Position in the Paid Search Results.
Note that all of the statistics are dependent on the time range set in the top right corner of the screen. (By default, AdWords will be set to yesterday.)
At the Ad Group level…
Each campaign can have an endless number of ad groups. Typically, all of the ad groups should be related. If you find you’ve created too many ad groups within a single campaign, this is where I would suggest creating another campaign.
You’ll see many of the same statistics in the ad group section, with the addition of:
- Search Max. CPC: Search Maximum Cost Per Click. This is the highest dollar amount you’re willing to pay for any given click within Google’s search network (or search engines).
- Content Max. CPC: Content Network Maximum Cost Per Click. If you chose during setup to have Google automatically bid on content network (or blogs and websites within the Google network), then your Content CPC will be set to “auto”. Otherwise, this is the maximum dollar amount you’re willing to pay for any click within the content network.
At the Ad level…
Individual ads exist at the deepest level. Like ad groups, you can have any number of ads. Remember: all of the ads in an ad group target the same keywords.
You’ll see a lot of the same statistics at the ad level with the addition of:
- % served: Percent Served. If you have multiple ads in an ad group, you can choose to allow Google to serve them either evenly over time, or ad rotation. With ad rotation (which I would suggest), Google will serve up the ad with the better click through rate, slowly showing it more and more over time. With % served, you can see which ad(s) are performing better, and edit/change others as necessary.
That’s it for the biggest statistics within Google AdWords.
