Dearest AdWords. I just wanted to drop you a note on this, the eve of your September 22nd downtime. You know, that system maintenance you’ve been warning us about for the past month?
Anyway, apology accepted. Your warnings have been easy to spot, and I feel I’ve had ample time to prepare to not work tomorrow. And for that, I thank you. Save for some random client account meltdown during the down time, I’ll probably survive not being able to make changes during the PM hours of Saturday.
Oh, hey, while you’re working on things, there are few features I was hoping you could toss in there for me. Nothing too big. Nothing that can’t be worked around using Excel. (I’ll wait until Christmas to ask for those.) Just a few new ways of viewing data we’re already getting to make things go a little smoother.
Here we go, in no particular order:
1.) Filter automatic placements by the URL. This is a really easy one. We can already filter by stats for each placement. CTR greater than 0.10%, more than 2 conversions, etc. But sometimes I just want to be able to quickly filter for and exclude all URLs that contain the word “free”. Don’t get me wrong, I love free stuff. But what my clients sell is not free, and I don’t want people in the “free” state of mind when they click on ads. And, pretty please with sugar on top, maybe we can get a graph for automatic placements as well as managed? Or an option for either?
2.) Choose to see only active ads. This could be in the same fashion as the “All enabled campaigns” option or a simple filter like we have for keywords. My annoyance with this is mostly due to the way I do ad copy testing. But it would be great to not have to scroll past the graveyard of paused ads from past ad tests.
3.) Select impression share as a metric on the graph. I know it’s not a key metric in most accounts, but for some it’s surprisingly important. Having the ability to see impression share numbers quickly over time while investigating without downloading a report and then creating a graph in Excel would certainly save me some time.
4.) Compare the stats of 2 elements in the graph. Whether it be 2 keywords, ads, ad groups, campaigns, anything. We have the ability to segment the stats by day, week, hour of the day, etc and see the blow-by-blow data for each keyword or ad. But occasionally, it would really simplify things to be able to graphically see one keyword’s CTR over time vs another’s.
5.) Aggregate data rows for segments. I’m pretty pleased to have these nice, collapsable stats for the campaigns tab earlier this month. A simple breakdown of segmented stats based on a custom filter. I’d just like this to be available for the rest of the tabs. Easy peasy, lemon squeeze, right? Please?
6.) Data for individual sitelinks. This has been a dream of mine for a long time. Although there are ways to get around it using URL tags and Analytics, it would still be better if advertisers were just given the data in the interface. With the current setup, it almost feels like an ad group that advertisers can write four ads for, but we can only see the ad group level stats, not individual ad stats. If your goal is to give your customers (searchers) the most relevant and fulfilling results available, why not let advertisers optimize everything? Would it really be that awful? Doesn’t make sense to me.
Some of these might be pretty specific to me and my management style, but each one of these has been something I’ve wanted on more than one occasion.
Anyway, I just wanted to share my little wish list with you. I mean, you’re already going to be in the system fiddling around with thing to the point where we can’t make any changes, so why not give us (me) a couple things we (I) would like? Who’s with me?
And, hey, all of you other advertisers, what features would you like AdWords to add? Add them in the comments. The more the merrier!
