Advanced PPC managers should already know all of these features, but beginners and intermediate level Adwords users can definitely get some new inspiration and ideas from this list to boost up performance. In this article, I will highlight 10 features that I love and frequently use.

1.  Adwords Keyword Tool

The Keyword Tool is a great starting point when starting a new Adwords campaign.  This tool provides global and local monthly searches for the keywords you want. You easily know which keywords people are searching for the most, so you can include this in your campaigns. Also, you’ll find keywords that are not relevant for your products, so you can include these words as negatives.

2.  Insights for Search

With Insights for Search you can compare search volume patterns across different keywords, regions, time frames and categories. With this tool, you can compare e.g. how your brand is doing comparing to competitors. For example, if you would like to know what  the top searches and rising searches are for the US in the travel category, the tool also provides this information.

3.  Toggle Graph Options

This option is great for easily comparing one metric with another. For example, comparing avg. position to CTR, but also you can compare to the date range you select which is a great way to compare different periods and see how your campaigns are performing over time.

4.  Ad Scheduling

This feature you will find under the settings tab of a campaign:

The Ad Scheduling feature lets you bid more or less during certain days and hours. For example, you can see by using the segment options in Adwords (which I will discuss later) that on Monday between 08:00 – 12:00am, you are getting a lot of clicks and also some conversions, but the cost per conversion are way higher than your targets.

You may decide to bid lower between 08:00 – 12:00am on Monday, so you can bid higher on the more profitable days/times to increase conversions and your ROI.

5.  Diagnose Keywords

You can find the diagnose keywords under the Keyword Tab:

With the diagnose keywords, you can quickly filter on Ads that have critical issues and therefore are not showing.

6.  Custom Columns

The columns option lets you select the metrics that you would like to show in Adwords. Click on customize columns and you’ll see five topics to choose from depending on which level. You can easily add and/or remove columns. There is an easy drag and drop function to order the metrics just the way you like it.

7.  Filters

I definitely advise you to check out the filter option in Adwords if you haven’t used it before. It’s a great way to filter quickly on the metrics you select.

As above screenshot shows, the filter option is to the left of the columns option. You can apply filters on campaign, ad groups, ads and keyword level. For some filter inspiration, check out this great post.

8.  Download Report

In Adwords, you can easily download reports directly from the tab you are in. Simple click on  and the download & schedule report option will open.

You have the ability to choose between different formats. Also, you can include any segment you would like. If it’s a report you would like to receive weekly, use the Email and schedule option.

9.  Segment Options

Segment can give great insights as to what’s performing well in your Adwords campaign and what isn’t.

If you are running campaigns on Computers and Tablets, and you would like to know the performance on tablets, just click on segment and choose ‘Device’. You will see the results for Computers and Tablets seperated, so it’s easy to compare the performance of these different devices:

There are many other options like segmenting on day of the week, hour of the day or segmenting the ACE experiment you are running.

10.  Automate

Adwords has an automate function to create rules for campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords. If you have ten adgroups with your top products and you would like to have a minimum avg position of 2 for these groups, you can create a rule for this by selecting the adgroups and click on automate .

Your rule could look something like below:

If you use the automate function, be sure to monitor the results closely. Making rules can be a time saver, but if it’s not giving you the results according to your KPI’s, delete the rule and use manually bidding to achieve your goals.

Adwords is a playground of possibilities which keeps innovating with new features such as the newly released labels. Be sure to regularly visit the Adwords blog and Ad Innovations to keep up to date.

And if you have some spare time, dive into Adwords and play around.

1. Visitors
2. Advertising
3. Traffic Sources
4. Content
5. Conversions

In this post, I want to talk about the Content category. I will not discuss all  the reports available, but the ones I use most frequently.

If you click on Content it will expand to the sections below:

Overview

The overview gives a quick overall view of your content. You can see metrics such as pageviews, unique pageviews, avg. time on page and bounce rate. By using the date range option on the top right corner, you can select your date range and also easily compare to past dates.

In the overview you have the option to click on page, page title, search term, event category or Adsense page. You will get a summary of the report and with one click you go to the full report.

Site Content

Site content reports consist of:

• Pages
• Content Drilldown
• Landing Pages
• Exit Pages

Pages

If you want to know which pages are visited the most on your website, this is the report for you. Below a screenshot of the top bar in Google Analytics when you click on Pages. These metrics you get for every page.

You can easily change the appearance of your data by using the view option.

There are five different views. Data (this is the standard view), Percentage, Performance, Comparison and Pivot.

I really like the Comparison view, because it’s easy to compare page performance against the site average. It’s great to get quick insights about which pages are performing well above or below site average regarding metrics such as Avg. Time on page, bounce rate and % of exits.

Landing Pages

In the landing pages option, you can see which pages are the most popular landing pages for your website and their performance. You can click on every page and by choosing secondary dimension you have many options to filter.

If you e.g. want to know which traffic sources are bringing the most traffic to your homepage, just click on the homepage and select source. (see screenshot)

Great thing about this report is that E-commerce data is included, so you see which pages bring you transactions and revenue.

Site Speed

In May 2011, Google announced the site speed option in the new Google Analytics interface. You can measure this by adding the line _trackPageLoadTime(); to your tracking code. Click  here for the detailed instructions.

In this report, the average page load time of your pages is shown. Google has officially announced that site speed is a signal in their search ranking algorithms, so I definitely recommend to start measuring the speed of your pages. After all, nobody likes slow loading pages.

Site Search

If you have a search engine on your website which visitors can use to search the site, you can measure the usage of this feature. The results you can find under the Site Search category in Google Analytics.

Site Search consists of:

•  Overview
•  Usage
•  Search Terms
•  Pages

Overview

In the overview, you see the percentage of visits with and without site search. Also some other metrics such as % search exits, % search refinements, time after search and search depth.

Usage

Usage also provides you with the percentage of visits with and without site search, but you have more options to filter your data through secondary dimension. Also, you have the view option to change the appearance of your data which I mentioned earlier in this post. And there is an E-commerce tab that gives you transactions, revenue and conversion rate data.

Search Terms

This report gives you the search terms people use to search your website. It’s a great way to find out what people are searching for. This report also provides you with the metrics % search exits, % search refinements, time after search and search depth for every search term.

With this information you can analyze the top search terms. For example, you can compare the % search exits for a particular search term to site average. If it’s very high, maybe your search engine is not giving the best results for the query.

Events

If you have event tracking enabled, you will use this report to see the results of your events.

The events category consists of:

• Overview
• Top Events
• Pages

With event tracking, you can measure all kinds of activity on your website such as PDF downloads, printing pages, interaction with a slidehow, watching videos and much more.

If you want to implement Event Tracking you can click here for all the details. I recommend first to decide all the things you want to track on your site using event tracking. This will help to create a clear report in Google Analytics after Event Tracking is implemented.

The Content category provides so many information about the performance of your website to keep you busy analyzing it for a long time. It’s a great place to find new insights and take action on it.

With the day parts option in Google Analytics, you can see the performance of your campaigns during the different hours of the day or days of the week.

For companies with a fixed daily budget, the day parts option can give you insight to increase or decrease bids on certain hours of the day to make optimal use of the limited available budget.

Every company should check out the day parts option to get an idea which hours or days of the week are performing the best. With this information, you can test by increasing or decreasing bids for certain hours or days of the week to improve your ROI.

First, I will explain where you can find the option of increasing and/or decreasing bids in Google Adwords. This is the option for ad scheduling. You can find this under the Settings tab of your campaign under advanced settings and then choose for the option:

Schedule: Start Date, End Date & Ad Scheduling

If you click on ‘edit’ next to ad scheduling, you will get a pop-up (see below screenshot). It will open in basic mode, but by clicking on bid adjustment, you can increase and/or decrease bids for certain hours or days.

By going to the Dimension tab of the campaign, you can filter on day of the week or hour of the day to see which days or hours are performing well according to the KPI’s you have set.

To get hours or day of the week information in Google Analytics, use the day parts option which you can find under Advertising > Adwords > Day Parts.

It provides you with some extra site performing metrics such as time on site, bounce rate and revenue. These metrics cannot be found using the option in Google Adwords.

Let’s look at a client’s Adwords campaign over a period of 3 months using the day parts option. Going to the day parts option, I can see the traffic graphed by hour. If I click on day of the week, the information is graphed by day from 0 (Sunday) till 6 (Saturday).

First, I exported the data to Excel for an overview of which hours are driving the most traffic, transactions and revenue. Choose the E-commerce tab before exporting, so you will get the revenue data. You will get an overview that looks like the image below:

I looked at the hours in which most transactions and revenue were generated. You can see that 462 of the 487 transactions are made between 08:00 hrs and 23:00 hrs. This is 94,87%!

This may not be very shocking, because in this example you are only driving in total 4.477 visits (0 till 7 hour + 23) of a total of 46.036, so 9,72%. But if you pay, for example, €1 per click for these visits you pay in total €4.477.

For this amount, you are getting 25 transactions, so per transaction this is:

€ 179,08 (€4.477/25)

It is pretty expensive to invest €179,08 for 1 transaction. The average order value is € 60, so this is definitely not profitable. You can consider investing your money in the more profitable hours of the days to increase the ROI.

Of course, it is all about testing to find out if investing your money on certain hours of the day will lead to better results. But you won’t find out until you run the day parts report in Google Analytics.

What is great from the day parts option in Google Analytics, is that you can drill all the way down to campaign level or even keyword level. For example, you want to know what your branding campaign is doing on certain hours of the day.

To get this information, just select Campaign through secondary dimension and you get all the campaign information each hour of the day. Click on the advanced option, so you can filter out your branding campaign.

You can do this for every campaign. For a client, I looked at the campaign with the highest costs and also the most conversions. This campaign is losing a lot of impressions due to lack of budget. If the budget is limited by a client, why not invest your money during the hours that are performing best?

For this particular client, 119 of total of 145 conversions happen between 10:00 – 19:00 hrs.  The campaign settings in Adwords are: show ads all days and hours.

It’s worth testing to increase the bids between 10:00 – 19:00 hrs to increase visibility during the time most people convert. Maybe you can decrease bids during the other hours, because people are less likely to convert.

The day parts in Google Analytics is a great way to find out how your Adwords campaigns are performing during each hour of the day. It can give you some valuable insights which can make you decide to increase and/or decrease bids on certain hours or maybe stop advertising on certain hours to increase the ROI of your campaigns.

First test to see what are the results of your changes, before you carry them out definitively.

I am interested in hearing your experiences using the day parts option in Google Analytics, so please leave your comments.