Imagine having a dashboard with all your Google Ads data in one place. You’ll see key metrics at a glance and immediately sense your campaign’s performance. These top-level numbers direct you to the deeper sections of your dashboard for more granularity and a better understanding of the performance.
Dashboards are not just about displaying the data; it’s about deriving meaning from them. We want to track trends over time, adjust strategies based on the numbers, and make informed data-supported decisions. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, but it can greatly improve the analysis and actions available to your team.
Why You Need A Google Ads Dashboard
Not everyone who needs to see the Google Ads results will want to log in and click around the platform. A dashboard helps you clearly display and organize the relevant data, allowing business stakeholders to view the metrics they seek quickly.
You can include any active Google Ad Types, including Paid Search, Display, Video/YouTube, Discovery, and Performance Max campaigns. Having all this data in one place improves the reporting process and makes tracking and monitoring your ad campaigns easier.
Using Looker Studio For Your Dashboard
Looker Studio is a free platform offered by Google that lets you visualize your Google Ad account data within the platform using their free connector. Since they are both Google Ads products, they seamlessly connect, and you can be confident there will be continued support for this connector in the future.
Depending on the complexity of your dashboards, there are also 3rd party tools to handle the API requests from Google Ads. I use Power My Analytics to bring new Google Ads data into Google Sheets, where I clean it up before using it as my dashboard source. Super Metrics is another popular connector that can help achieve a similar result.
Top Google Ads Dimensions
Knowing your top-level numbers is great, but you’ll want to break out the data by dimensions when analyzing the effectiveness of your Google Ads. This provides visibility into what is driving results and what is underperforming. Based on your dashboard, you can shift the budget to your higher-performing assets and optimize your campaign performance.
Looking at a single dimension is better than looking at your account as a whole, but you’ll find the best results by analyzing multiple dimensions simultaneously. For example, you can filter down to a single Google Ads campaign to see what landing pages perform best. Based on your landing page analysis, you can review the performance by user device type or see what keywords yield the best result.
Account – Viewing your Google Ads account-level data is helpful for high-level reports or when comparing multiple accounts.
Campaign – Breaking your data out by Google Ads campaigns is the first step in analyzing your performance. Start at the high level, and dig deeper based on the numbers.
Ad Group – Reviewing your ad group performance helps you understand the driving force behind your Google Ads campaigns.
Ad/Creative – After ad group analysis, review your top-performing creative. It could be the ad copy, the images/videos, or a combination. Comparing the performance of individual ads is an excellent way to improve campaigns.
Keyword/Search Terms – Understand the intent of the searcher. Based on what they are looking for, you may find pockets of highly engaged visitors in your keywords reports.
Landing Page – Not all pages are created equal. Assuming not all of your traffic is going to the same page, breaking out the metrics by landing page is a helpful way to view performance.
Device – The website experience on a mobile device is very different than on a desktop. Tracking engagement and performance metrics by device category helps you perform accurate analysis.
Region/Country – For those running national or international campaigns, breaking out performance by geographic region can shed light on your best and worst-performing regions.
Top Google Ads Metrics To Include
The list of Google Ads metrics below is incomplete, but it’s a great starting point. Depending on how your ad campaigns are set up, you can adjust the metrics and KPIs to focus on. Plenty of other metrics within Google Ads can help understand campaign performance, but I didn’t want this list to be too long.
Impressions – The number of times your ad was shown.
Clicks – The number of times your ad received a click.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) – The percent of impressions that resulted in a click. CTR=Clicks/Impressions
Cost / Ad Spend – Total ad spend, the amount of money spent on your ads.
Cost Per Click (CPC) – The average amount paid per click. CPC = Cost/Clicks
Cost Per Mille (CPM) – The average amount paid per thousand impressions. CPM = Cost/(impressions/1,000)
Conversions – The number of times a specific action was taken, often related to your KPIs.
Cost Per Conversion (CPA) – The average amount paid per conversion/action. CPA = Cost/Conversions
Conversion Rate (CVR) – The percent of clicks that resulted in a conversion.
Conversion Value/Revenue – The earned value from the campaigns, whether from ecommerce or an estimated value per conversion.
Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) – The revenue earned compared to the amount spent. ROAS = revenue from ads/spend on ads
Quality Score – A score from 1-10 rating your relevancy to a given keyword. No formula, but it includes Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience.
Impression Share (IS) – The percent of impressions you received out of impressions you were eligible for. IS = (Impressions Received)/(Eligible Impressions)
FAQs
What is a Google Ads Dashboard?
Google Ads Dashboards organize the data from your Google Ads, presenting it in a way where you can easily see and measure the performance of your Google Ads accounts.
How do I get to my Google Ad Dashboard?
If your Google Ads dashboard is built on Looker Studio, you can go to looker.google.com to view all of the reports you can access. I recommend saving a link to your dashboard report in your favorites bar for quick and easy access.
Should I use Google Analytics in my Google Ads dashboard?
Google Ads provides most of the relevant fields for a dashboard. However, Google Analytics offers several website engagement metrics not available in Google Ads, so it can be worth including.