Google Ads Reporting: Guides and Examples
Whether you’re just getting started with Google Ads or looking to brush up on your skills: we’ve compiled a list of the most important Google Ads skills. Skip around to brush up your knowledge or read through them one at a time for a comprehensive 101 on common Google Ads tasks!
Remember: if you need further help with your accounts drop us a line!

Overview
How to Run an Effective Ad Test Analysis
Writing Ad Copy for Adwords: The Technical Process
How to Build Keywords and New Ads
How to Perform a Negative Keyword Scrub
How to Perform Hour of Day & Day of Week Analyses
How to Perform a Sitelinks Extension Analysis
How to Perform a Callout Extension Analysis
Excel is arguably the most crucial part of any Paid Marketer’s arsenal. We cover off on the most useful Excel functions and formulas like Vlookup, conditional formatting, substitutions, text to columns, and sumif formulas.
Ad Test Analysis is an extremely useful report that will tell you a lot about general performance, but more importantly about the performance of individual headlines, descriptions, and their combinations. This is a task that should be run a minimum of twice per month, and any time you see performance starting to go down in your accounts.
Ad copy is the hook that catches the customer. After running an Ad Test Analysis, you may find that an ad is under performing and should be replaced. Or you may find one that’s doing much better than the others and you might want to test variations on it. Here are the technical steps to make that happen.
Adding new ads and keywords into your campaigns is another key area in paid search. If you’re not constantly optimizing, you can bet your competitors are.
It’s just as important to tell Google what terms to not show your ad for as it is to show for the right terms. After all, you don’t want to pay to show an ad to someone searching for “Nike Shoes” if your store only sells dress shoes! This post covers how to run the analysis to get a good list of negatives together. This process should be run frequently (at least every two weeks).
These reports are excellent for optimizing accounts. Using the data you can adjust ad schedules so that your ads are only running during peak times for higher CTR and more conversions.
These reports can be handy when deciding which platforms your ads should show on. It’s important to run reports like these occasionally because you never know when you might be surprised by the performance (or lack thereof) of ads on specific devices.
Where your ads are showing is an extremely important aspect when it comes to optimizing accounts. Running ads for a tech product in rural counties is a waste of money, or you may find that certain locales have higher conversion rates. It makes the most sense to bid higher in those locations.
If you’re not using extensions for your Google Ads you’re not taking up enough room on SERPs when your ad is showing. There are a number of ad extensions that may or may not apply to your business, but any company running Google Ads should be using sitelink extensions, which simply link to various areas of your site from the SERP.
Callout extensions are a great way to call attention to features or services your business provides (and again, take up more room on the SERPs). Running this analysis will help you determine which are performing best and which may need to be re-written or dropped.
This is a task that’s key for lower budgets (or anyone especially conscious about spend). Basically, this task helps you identify which keywords to pause or remove to shift the focus to keywords that are actually performing well and within budget.
This one is more about Display Ads: a placement analysis can tell you a lot about where your ads are performing the best. If Display is a big part of your marketing effort, you should be running this report at least monthly.