If you currently use Google AdWords, then you understand the importance of a properly tuned PPC campaign. In years past, keyword monitoring and other aspects of marketing awareness were limited due to a lack of offerings by the utility, but this has rapidly changed over the past couple of years. As more and more people take advantage of this excellent marketing tool, it has been a desire of Google’s to implement more advanced metrics and monitoring tools into the system for its customers. Whether your PPC campaigns have performed admirably or have struggled, you can still gain benefits from the following features offered within AdWords’ interface.

Comparing Time Periods

AdWords was limited in previous versions in areas such as time comparisons, which meant that you could only evaluate performance for one given period of time. Recently, Google unveiled its time comparison features as a way for marketers and webmasters to quickly compare two various points in time for one or more particular campaigns. This gives users answers to questions such as, “which campaigns have been the most successful in terms of clicks?” and “which keywords received a certain amount of likes?”. When you are pinging lists of keywords via PPC campaigns, it is important to monitor both current and historical performance in order to put things into a relative perspective. The time period comparison function now offered in AdWords is a great way to do so.

Using Top Movers

Whenever drastic shifts in your PPC campaign’s performance occur, you used to have to guess as to what was causing the shifts. With AdWords’ Top Movers function now available, however, you can see what has caused an uptick or drop in your campaign’s performance. Maybe you have recently made changes to your campaign or perhaps more competition within your AdWords category has manifested: with the Top Movers category, you can quickly get to the bottom of these trends. Essential for those who do not have time to data mine, the Top Movers report will summarize shifts in a campaign so that you can determine what has happened and what is behind these changes.

Fusing Analytics and AdWords

Google Analytics can now be combined with AdWords to provide greater insight into how your ads perform and how that relates to user interaction on your website. For instance, webmasters will be able to evaluate metrics such as the average amount of time spent on your site after they click on one of your ads and how many pages on your site were visited by said user who arrived via your advertisement. This information can then be compared against your organic Analytics traffic to see if there is a discrepancy in between the two.

Conclusion

With the newer features that have been integrated into AdWords, webmasters and marketers alike will appreciate the fact that Google is pinging lists of valuable information and metrics to their accounts for review. Through the use of time period comparisons, a list of recent major changes in your campaigns’ performances and the combination of Analytics/AdWords to gain greater insight, users will be prepared to react to any changes in their PPC campaign’s performance.