All Campaigns view

The main campaign summary page lists your campaigns and gives summary data about each of them. When you create your second campaign, all the column headings (Campaign Name, Current Status, and so on) become clickable so you can sort your campaigns in various ways. For example, you probably want the campaigns that cost the most to be in your face more; click the Cost heading to sort from most to least costly. Click Cost again to reverse the order.

Campaign Name

By default, AdWords assigns your campaign exciting and informative names like Campaign #1 and Campaign #2. For your own sanity, please replace these generic names with descriptions that will still make sense when you’re running dozens of campaigns at once. You can change the name of a campaign by selecting the check box next to the name and then clicking the Edit Settings button above the list of campaigns.

Current Status

Campaigns can be active, paused, or deleted by checking the box next to the campaign or campaigns you want to change, and clicking the Pause, Resume or Delete buttons above the list of campaign names.

- Active: Active campaigns currently display your ads to searchers. They cost you money and bring visitors to your Web site.

- Paused: Paused campaigns are on hold, but can be reactivated by a single click. Pausing a campaign automatically pauses all the ad groups in that campaign. No impressions, no clicks, no visitors.

- Deleted: Deleted campaigns can also be reactivated by a single click. So what’s the difference between pausing and deleting a campaign? Beats me. If you delete a campaign, you can’t actually make it go away. You can hide it by choosing Show All But Deleted Campaigns from the drop-down list that currently reads Show All Campaigns. This can be helpful if you don’t want to clutter your screen with old campaigns, but still want to see active and paused campaigns. Also, it’s helpful to delete campaigns if you’re writing Adwords For Dummies and you don’t want the world to see every detail of your AdWords account in your screen shots.

Current Budget

Google shows you the daily budget you set for each campaign. It’s grayed out and bracketed in paused and deleted campaigns. You can change your daily budget for any campaign by checking the box next to the campaign name and clicking the Edit Settings button above the list of campaigns.

Clicks

A click represents one person clicking your ad and arriving on your landing page. Google doesn’t count multiple clicks from the same computer on the same day (or tries very hard not to) that’s so your competitors can’t sit behind their desks and develop carpal tunnel syndrome trying to bankrupt you by clicking your ad repeatedly. Two clicks equals two unique visitors to your site.

Impr.

Impr. is short for impressions, or the number of times your ad was included on a page that Google showed to a searcher.

CTR

CTR (Click-Through Rate) is the ratio of clicks to impressions, expressed as a percentage. It’s one of your most important AdWords numbers, so if you’re confused, take a little time to get clear. You can calculate CTR by dividing clicks by impressions. For example, if 200 people see your ad, and 12 of them click it, here’s the math:

12 ÷ 200 = .06 = 6.00%

You’d then brag at the AdWords Saloon, “My CTR is six percent.” And everyone would understand that your ad was so compelling, 6 out of every 100 people who saw it ended up on your Web site.

Avg. CPC

The Avg. CPC (Cost Per Click) column tells you how much, on average, you paid Google to get a visitor to your Web site. You may have different average CPCs by campaign, ad-group, keyword, and ad. A big part of AdWords management is deleting or improving elements of your advertising that cost you more than you make back, so your average click cost is an important metric.

Cost

Your cost is simply all the money you’ve spent on clicks. In this screen, it’s broken down by campaign. When you drill deeper, you can see how much each ad and each individual keyword costs you. (After you’ve set up conversion tracking.

You can change the date range in the All Campaigns or any other view by selecting one of the presets in the drop-down list just below the date, or by selecting the lower radio button and inputting any two dates. For some reason, Google insists that your start date be before your end date (that’s a little un-quantum-physics, don’t you think?). Get into the habit of checking your date range first, whenever you work on campaign management. Otherwise you panic if you see only six clicks, when the cause isn’t a broken campaign, but a view set to Today instead of This Month.

Individual Campaign view

Click your campaign name to see your account at the ad-group level. You can see all your ad groups’ statistics, including two new columns: Default Bid and Avg. Pos.

- Default Bid: Your default bid is the maximum CPC you selected when you created the account. You can change this bid for specific campaigns, the ad groups, or even individual keywords. You can also bid more or less based on the source of the traffic: Google, search partners, or content partners.

- Avg. Pos: The average position of your ad refers to where it appears in relation to all other ads showing for the same keyword. At the ad-group level, an average position of 5.7 means that on average, your ad shows most often in position 6, less often in position 5, and occasionally higher or lower. If your average position is greater than 8, your ads are not showing nearly as much as they might only very determined searchers ever go on to the second page of Google results. You can see some trends, even with extremely small numbers. For example, my new Cold Calls ad group has received 2 clicks out of 41 impressions, for a rather nice 4.87% CTR. This CTR translates into 49 visitors to my Web site for every thousand people who view the ad after searching for keywords in the Cold Calls ad group. Each click cost me just under $0.20 on average, so I can expect to pay $9.80 for those 49 visitors.