Top Google AdWords Reporting Systems
Online advertising is officially bigger than print advertising in the U.S. now, and that makes effective online marketing and advertising are critical to the success of an agency. Google AdWords is one of the most powerful tools that an agency can use to achieve that success. While AdWords can be very effective, it can often be very difficult to judge this effectiveness through the default report system. This is where third party programs come in handy. They can make the job of a marketer exponentially easier and aid in reporting back to the client. Here is an overview of four such programs and their strengths and weaknesses.
$90/month.
Campaigns – Impressions Last Month
Chart compares campaigns’ daily impressions in the last month.
Zoho Reports is a fairly straightforward reporting system. It takes the data from the AdWords campaigns and organizes it in a simple fashion. The data can be seen as a spreadsheet full of numbers, or it can be automatically converted into easy to understand graphs.
Pros
•Easy and straightforward to understand.
•Well organized data.
•Automatically converts data to graphs for you.
•Shows clear expenses.
Cons
•Only for analyzing Campaign and Ad Group level data. Nothing for specific keyword or ad performance.
•Does not do anything beyond giving the raw data. Does not perform any analyses or show comparisons to other campaigns.
$299/mo under $10,000.
$499/mo $10,000-$25,000.
$999/mo above $25,000.
WordSream PPC Advisor is software that focuses on analyzing data, giving it a relative score and offering advice for how to improve it. The program takes key components from a campaign such as Click Through Rate, Impression Share or Wasted Spend and shows how well your account is doing compared to other accounts. This is shown by both giving a direct comparison to this average and by giving each component a percentage score based off effectiveness. The big appeal of this program is that it gives advice on how to improve your campaign. Some examples would be suggesting you use more negative keywords to minimize wasted money or how to increase traffic and qualified leads.
Pros
•Good visual representations that compare your data to others.
•The score system lets you know just how well your account is going and what specific components are or aren’t working.
•Offers real advice on how to increase efficiency of many parts of a campaign.
•Has data that other reports are missing, such as the very significant Quality Score that Google itself uses to determine how relevant your ads are overall.
•Has keyword research tools.
Cons
•Relatively high cost that goes up based on how much you spend on your account. The program does have a free trial for those interested in trying it out.
•Comparative score system is not balanced by account spending. $15,000 budgets can be compared to $99,000,000 budgets so the score will most likely be skewed.
•Good for starting a campaign, but once the initial advice is given and used the high cost could become more unjustified as time goes on.
$99/month.
Raven Tools is much simpler and basic program than WordStream, but not without its merits. The program is best for those just looking for a faster and simpler way to organize and see their data without a need for any extra features or advice. The report that it makes has a heavy focus on keywords data and is presented in an organized table or graph that anyone could understand. It provides you with data such as visits, bounce rate, or average time on site for every single keyword used in an account. The program also boosts that it uses multiple sources for its reports compared to most programs that use just one.
Pros
•Straightforward and easy reports that will save you time of sifting through data.
•Large focus on Keywords and their data.
•Is built on an automatic system to save even more time.
•Relatively cheap cost.
•Uses many external data sources.
Cons
•Reports are not visually appealing and may want to be spiced up before being sent to clients.
•Unable to perform in-depth analysis, just see the organized data.
•No rank tracking options. Does not show how well the account is doing compared to others and offers no advice for improvements.
$99/mo up to 10 accounts.
$199/mo up to 25 accounts.
Additionly is a newer program and has a heavy focus on making the whole process of account reports faster and easier. This program has an easy system to create bright and vibrant reports with easy access to your data. Another cool feature of this program is that it has up to date notifications for any unusual activity in the account. There is an Explain feature that identifies the reason for any of these changes in activity and advises how to fix it. So, for example, if an account saw a considerable drop in clicks, Additionly automatically identifies the campaigns, adgroups, keywords and placements most responsible.
Pros
•Explain feature is a very useful tool to find and identify problems and their solutions.
•Creates daily simple reports to review the progress of an account.
•Visually appealing reports are made automatically and are very easy to share with others.
•Alerts let you know when something happens right away.
•Campaign performance is benchmarked automatically based on smart algorithms that take daily seasonality and the latest trends into account.
Cons
•The extra information and updates are good for smaller projects but can be too obtrusive the larger the project is.
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