Understanding & Analyzing Google Ads Extension Data

By Brad

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General, PPC Management

Google has several ad extensions views, and they are not intuitive as to how to use each one. In this video, we’re going to show you how to use the views for managing, analyzing, and testing your extensions.

We’ll walk through:

  • Overview of extension views
  • Determine if you’re missing extensions
  • Find out if Google is not showing your extensions
  • Learn where to test extensions and pause underperforming ones

Referenced Articles:

We hope you enjoy the video!

Full Transcript

0:00:00.0: Hello. In this video, we’re going to look at all the various ad extension views and how to use each one to optimize your ad extensions. So, when you first got to extensions, you often see the summary, now this is nice because you can see how an extension looks with your ads. But it doesn’t really give you a lot of data to work from, so if you need that sort of preview to get a feel for how it all works, this is useful. But often we want to start getting into are the more specific views. So, I’m going to go to table, we often start with the extensions view, this is the aggregate data for that extension at the level you are in in your account. So right now, we’re at all campaigns, so what we could use this for is to find extensions that aren’t getting any impressions. That tells us for some reason something’s wrong with this extension, we probably need to go investigate. Now, if you want to see how you’re doing for every campaign, you will have to click through every campaign, and which can be a lot of work, so there are better ways to look at some of these things.

0:01:09.8: Now, you don’t want to use this data for optimization because if you have brand and non-brand then if an extension’s displayed with a brand with a lot better metrics and not displayed as much with non-brand. Then you’ll have skewed data, so it’s useful for the overall look to see where you’re not showing. It’s also useful to go to automated extensions. Automated extensions are extensions Google had to make for you because you were missing certain extensions in the account that could be displayed. So, if you have data for automated extensions, this is essentially telling you you’re missing something, you probably need to do an audit across your extensions. Now the downside of this view is you can’t segment it by campaign, even in your downloads, there is no campaign segment. So, you have to click through every single campaign to see where automated are displayed to understand where to create them. Which is why there’s a better way to do this that we’re going to cover.

0:02:10.5: Our other view is the association’s view; this will show us where it’s been added and the level. Is it an account, an ad group, or a campaign level extension? So, this is now when we start getting some real data we can work with. Now often we don’t want to see it all at once, we may want to just see site links or just callouts. So, with this, we can look at our data, we can even jump into a specific campaign, and then we can start to see how each extension does to see if we want to pause one for that campaign, remove one, and so forth. Now, the other thing to note when you see this data is that your information here is for when the extension is displayed with the ad. It’s not telling you; this is how many people actually clicked on the extension. So, if we go to segment, this extension versus other. Now we can see how many people clicked on the extension versus clicked on any other part of the ad, which could be a different extension or the headline itself. And so, here’s what we going to start to see. If they click on the extension, we have a $55 CPA. To click anywhere else, it’s a $78 CPA. It’s a good extension. This one’s even better it’s 707, and so this is where we can find places where clicks on this extension are actually a higher CPA than other places on the ad.

0:03:37.5: Alright, this extension needs to change, and that’s a good way to use some of this information. Now, the other problem we run into though, as we look at this kind of data is staring at your information. Okay, I have four site links here, I have four here, I have four here, where do I… Am I missing an extension? Oh, I only have one here, one here, that’s a crazy amount of work to look at. So, there are much better ways to do this with downloads and pivot tables. So, we put together an article, it was a few years ago when Google ad was still called AdWords on exactly how to do this. So, we’ll link into the video of how to do this audit. But this will show you how to figure out where you have extensions not being displayed. And the reason why is even if you have enough extensions created, Google still may not show them all. So, you might have six site links in a campaign, but only three are getting impressions. So even though you technically have six, because only three get impressions, you still need to make three or figure what to do with those site links because they’re not being displayed. So, it’s a really big difference between having created them and them actually being displayed.

0:04:56.7: Now, if you don’t want to do all the work, you can use a system like Adalysis which will just show you, here are your campaigns, how many extensions exist for each, where did you accidentally miss something, or they’re not being displayed. So, we can quickly jump and say, oh, callouts, these four campaigns don’t have callouts, we need to go create them there. And so, this is an easy way of getting automated recommendations of where to create more or where you don’t have any showing, or where you may have less than the minimum number showing. And so, we think about how many we should create, we have a nice article that looks through the common extension types and how many you should make of each. So, with your extensions overall, your extension view is just aggregate data, you can click through every campaign to start making decisions, it’s a lot of work. Your primary usage is going to be looking at automated for where things are not being displayed. And then your association’s view starts to get into your actual data, so you can start to see by ad group or campaign or account level, how are you doing.

0:06:09.7: For extensions that can get clicks, we can segment this extension versus other to get more information. And then lastly, we want to use either pivot tables or software to do the audits to save a lot of time, because glancing through is way too much work. And so, by using either one of those techniques, you can ensure that you have all the extensions and that they’re getting impressions. And then once that’s happening, then you can start to do some optimization work of getting rid of the worst ones and choosing the best ones, to ensure that you get the most out of the ad extensions that you’re using across your account.

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