Of Dimensions and Labels

While we manage accounts large and small, delivering measurable return on investment for a client’s marketing dollars, we’re assisted in our reporting needs by Webtrends Ads. Our team appreciates the automated and highly customizable bidding, the powerful campaigning features for scaling campaigning efforts across publishers and countries, among other features, but the team gains actionable insight through the built-in reporting features in Webtrends Ads. I’d like to share an advanced reporting feature called Dimensions in Webtrends Ads.

To us, a good search marketing program has well organized campaigns and ad groups. Strategic targeting and segmenting can be achieved through campaigns; by product or service; by territory or geography; by target device; or by sub-network offered by the publisher (search vs. display vs. search partners, etc.). Campaigns make for nice and simple campaign performance reports, but for more tactical insight of their search marketing efforts an advertiser can produce ad group and keyword-level performance reports.

How can you quickly deliver reports beyond the structure of your search marketing campaigns? A restructure is out-of-question for most, and Excel can be a rabbit-hole that both analysts and account managers fall into without much of a report to show for. I’d like to showcase Dimensions in Ads, and a new feature in AdWords, Labels, that we use when working in client accounts.

via marinsoftware.com

All Webtrends Ads clients have access to Dimensions, though none are setup when you first login. It’s a blank canvas. That’s a good thing. The advanced reporting of Dimensions is open for the advertiser to create as they see fit, and we don’t limit the number of Dimensions you can create.

In our example, we’ll start by creating a Dimension to report performance of individual keyword expansion actions made by members on our account management team. Simply create the Dimension, give it a good name: Keyword Expansions by Team Member. This Dimension is now available in the View Builder in Webtrends Ads. The View Builder allows a marketer to quickly build performance reports with custom Dimensions.

Now, in any view of campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ad creatives, etc. in Webtrends Ads you can apply a team member’s name in the Dimension Keyword Expansions by Team Member. The next morning, after I arrive at the office, I finish a quick keyword expansion and apply to the Dimension “Tim Germer” to all keywords and ad creatives in my advertising expansion. Now my other team members can view what I just uploaded very quickly by simply viewing the specific Dimension’s performance reporting in Ads. Oh great, but greater transparency and accountability is a good thing. For enterprise-level search marketing efforts, do you know which team member on your marketing team produces the highest return on investment marketing expansions in your search channel? If you do, how long does it take you to produce that report? Tagging those expansions with Dimensions in Webtrends Ads is much quicker.

Want to know how a particular promotion you ran across many keywords, different ad groups and campaigns did over the weekend? Easy, Dimensions. Want to know how your updated Sitelinks performed compared to the prior Sitelinks (across different accounts and countries even)? Easy, Dimensions. These are only a few examples and since any entity in Ads can be tagged with a Dimension we’ll leave you with your imagination.

What if you don’t have Webtrends Ads? Well, we do like what Google is doing with their new feature named Labels in AdWords. Labels in AdWords were designed to help advertisers “organize the elements in your account into meaningful groups so you can quickly and easily filter and report on the data that is of most interest to you” (Using labels in AdWords). Sweet, sounds like Dimensions in Webtrends Ads. We’ve been using Labels in AdWords for a few weeks now and are enjoying the benefit of greater control in our reporting in AdWords.

A simple win for our team here is to label campaigns by their targeting type: Search vs. Display, Tablet vs. Mobile; to label keywords by their match type; Broad, Phrase, Exact; to label keywords with an Expansion distinction for those keywords we advertise on generated by a Google Opportunities analysis. For the latter, we can now very quickly report-out what was expanded into what campaigns in the account, without messing around in Google’s very user un-friendly Change History report. A point of critical feedback to Google is their complete omission of bulk editing for applying Labels. Their Help article on Labels suggests the user to, “…apply the label to the ones that are showing first and then advance to the next page”. Seems like a cruel joke when you have thousands of entities and only can page by a max of 500. Don’t look to Google AdWords Editor for help. Labels don’t exist there yet.

In the meantime, the team here will continue to enjoy our use of Dimensions in Webtrends Ads, and just dabble in Google’s Labels. We’ll even be applying them across tens of thousands of entities in Webtrends Ads with a click of a checkbox, and Apply. Simple.

For more information about how Webtrends Ads can help you, contact our team at chase.wells@webtrends.com or visit Webtrends.com.