This year, my wife and I once again planted a vegetable garden in our back yard. Every few days I’d check on their health and progress. For the record: the lettuce did fine, the rhubarb is still growing, and let’s just not talk about the tomatoes, ok?

Your adCenter campaigns and their ads are a lot like my vegetable garden: it’s not enough to create some ads, set a budget, and bid on some keywords. You also have to monitor the health and progress of your campaign. To help you do that, adCenter provides you with a great set of tools - adCenter reports.

With nearly two dozen different report formats to choose from, you can monitor your campaigns for everything from budget to performance (a dozen performance reports alone!), from targeting to conversions, and from traffic sources to tactics and channels.

Getting to reports

Finding reports in adCenter is astoundingly easy. Along the top of the adCenter screen are several tabs – Home, Campaigns…and Reports. Click Reports, and there you are on the Reports page.

Now what?

Well, it depends. If you’ve never created an adCenter report before, the page heading will be Create new report (if you have, you’ll be on the Report Center page and you’ll see up to 20 of your most recent reports). Let’s say you’re new to this, though, so you’re looking at a page where you can select the type of report you want to run (a keyword performance report, perhaps, or a budget summary); the unit of time you want to use (by the hour, the day, a week at a time…), and the date range you want the report to cover (perhaps last month, this month, or the last seven days).

Basically, that’s all you have to do. You can run the report right now by clicking Create new report at the bottom of the page.

But wait, there’s more!

If you want, of course, you can fine-tune your report. For example, select just the columns of information you absolutely want to see, and skip anything else. Or arrange the columns in the report in the order you want them. You can give your report a name, and save it so you can run it again. You can even set up a schedule that’ll automatically run your report at specific times.

And the point of all this? Simple: you want your ad campaign garden to grow, to flourish. You want a good harvest, a good return on your investment. Monitoring your campaigns using adCenter reports will help you do all that.

To start with…

So many reports – where to start? Here are two you can try; they can give you information that’s actionable or at least helpful and, like lettuce and rhubarb, they’re personal favorites of mine.

  • Campaign performance. Get info about your campaigns’ quality score, number of impressions, clicks, click-through rate, average cost per click, and average position on the search results pages.
  • Search campaign change history. I’m always trying to fine-tune my own online campaigns (yes, I have my own adCenter account), and this report lays out every change I’ve made to them during a specified time period.

I’m thinking that if I’d had garden monitoring tools like these, maybe I could have saved those tomato plants.

Thanks for reading,

Joel Davis, Lead Technical Writer - adCenter Help