I’m totally a creature of habit and have truly resisted getting acquainted with the new AdWords Platform. However, there are admittedly a few new features I really do like.

Three of them involve new reporting features for Shopping Campaigns. They are enough to make me hit that accursed blue “Try the New Adwords” rectangle from time to time to check on the performance of my shopping campaigns there instead of in the old platform.

Product Diagnostics Tool

I love this tool, which makes finding product issues easy-peasy.

To get there, in the new Adwords, select one of your shopping campaigns, then select “Products” from the toolbar. Next, select the Diagnostics tag.

The first area I check out is the Disapproved Products section. If you hover over each section, you can see some of the products in that particular category or then click “view products” to see all of them.

There is a help link included if you need additional information on how to resolve the issue. It’s handy that all product errors are included in this section and you don’t have to jump to each campaign to view the products in that given shopping campaign.

Products Ready to Serve

In the above screenshot, you can also see sections for “Ready to serve” and “Not ready to serve.” These are an easy way to see which products are or aren’t ready to be featured in your shopping campaign. Products are included in the “Not ready to serve” bucket when they are excluded due to one of the disapproval errors or excluded from the campaign. Another reason is if the item is out of stock.

If you found that you have a product that isn’t ready to be served and want to find out when that happened (or vice versa), you can see this by adding this segment to the chart in the Product groups section.

To get there in the new Adwords, navigate to one of your Shopping Campaigns. From there, select “Product groups.” In the graph, use the drop down to select “Shopping” then “Products ready to serve.” Then, pick another metric such as clicks or impressions.

In the example below, I have impressions. And, you can see exactly where one there was one less product serving (about ¾ of the way through the last 30 days) and then the direct corresponding drop in impressions that were delivered for the campaign.

Absolute Top Impression Share

Google defines Absolute Top Impression Share (ATIS) as “the number of “absolute top” impressions you received in Shopping results over the total times you could’ve been in the top impression.” The absolute top is the shopping ad in the leftmost position, which Google reports as receiving three times the amount of engagement over the other positions. As an example of how this is calculated, say that your ad appeared in the absolute top position 10 times, but was eligible 20 times total. Your impression share is 50%.

To see ATIS, go to Products, then click on the icon to change the columns. Click on the drop-down arrow associated with Competitive metrics. From there, select the “Search abs. top IS” box.

Bonus tip: while you’re here, also select “Product Status” under Shopping, which will show you the status of your products. It’s another great way to see if your products are ineligible, ready to serve, etc.

In the image below, I added both ATIS and Product Status so you can see the results for one of my campaigns. Take note of the circled ATIS differences and then the CPCs for each of these. I can now easily see where I need to increase my CPC to bring up the ATIS. I also can see the CPC for the other related product that is working to yield 76%. If I want to increase that even further, I can increase the CPC for that product. If your bids are already at their max, take another look at factors such as image quality or product title, which impact the overall ad quality. Other ideas include using positive and negative bid modifiers to help focus your ad delivery to the device and/or region that are most pertinent to your business to hone in on your sweet spots.

You can find a few other tips here.

So, go into the new Adwords and play around with some of these new reporting features. The timing couldn’t be better with the holiday season right around the corner, so remember to keep checking back in on your product delivery, status, and impression shares.

While you’re at it, check out our post about shopping campaign automation tips to ease up your PPC management life before the craziness of the holiday season hits.

What are your favorite shopping reports (in the old or new platform)?  Comment below to let us know!