Here at Clix, we love finding new ways to save time in our workdays to help make us more efficient and productive. Whether it’s automating ad reviews, testing automated bidding strategies or taking advantage of AdWords editor features we welcome process improvement with open arms! One time-saving AdWords feature that has gotten little spotlight since it’s September 2016 launch is campaign groups and performance targets.
What is the Campaign Groups Feature?
The campaign groups feature allows you to group campaigns together that have similar themes or KPIs and then set performance targets for each group. For instance, if you have varying budget goals by product or lead type and multiple campaigns for each, then you can group those campaigns together and easily monitor and anticipate if you will meet your goals.
Campaign groups can consist of Search, Display, Shopping or Video campaigns. Once you create a campaign group, you can set a performance target for that group, such as a spending target or an average CPA target, and you can edit this goal at any time.
Creating Campaign Groups
In the new UI, you’ll find campaign groups under the arrow next to ‘All campaigns’ in the far lefthand navigation panel:
From there, you’ll choose ‘Create Campaign Group’:
Once you select this option, you’ll name your new campaign group, choose the campaigns you want to include and select a performance target:
For now, you have two options for performance targets — clicks or conversions — with the following options for each:
Clicks
Average CPC target
Average click (number) target
Average spend target
Conversions
Average CPA target
Average conversion (number) target
Average spend target
Once you choose your performance target, you can enter a date range, which is optional, as well as 1-3 of the performance target metrics; then choose ‘Done’ and create your campaign group:
Reviewing Campaign Group Performance
To review the performance of your campaign group target goals, simply select the ‘Performance Targets’ options in the grey lefthand navigation panel:
Note that if you didn’t initially set a date range you will see All Time data on the Performance Targets tab, but this target, as well as the others, can be edited inline at any time. Just select the checkbox next to your stats line item and then choose the ‘Edit’ drop-down:
To see forecasting for whether you are on track to meet your goals, just choose the blue ‘More details’ drop shown in the upper righthand corner of the screenshot above:
The charts will show you your current and projected stats for each of your targets as well as the percentage change that you will meet your targeted goals.
Additionally, if you’ve chosen your campaign group in the black, far lefthand navigation panel, you can then choose the Overview tab in the grey lefthand navigation panel and see additional data for just the campaigns in your group:
Campaign Group Limitations
There are a couple important things to note about the limitations of campaign groups:
- Each campaign can only be in one campaign group at a time.
- You can’t add campaigns with shared budgets to a campaign group.
Ultimately, even though there are some limitations with campaign group set up as well as performance target options, this is a good place to start in making advertisers’ lives a little easier for viewing various goal metric projections, and I look forward to seeing how this tool improves in the future.
Have you tried campaign groups? Do you have tips to share? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
