How To Use The Google AdWords Dimensions Tab
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5 Ways to Crush It with the Dimensions Tab in Google AdWords

If you blink, you might miss it.
Hidden in plain sight in your AdWords account is the dully named Dimensions tab.
Most advertisers, even if they know it’s there at all, don’t give it much thought.
That’s a BIG mistake.
Why? Because the Dimensions tab holds some of the most useful information you can dig up about your AdWords campaigns.
Yes, a lot of the important data you need to manage your account is on the Keywords, Ads, and Ad groups tabs.
BUT… once you get a little deeper into AdWords, the Dimensions tab opens up a whole new, well, dimension, to optimizing your campaigns (hey, maybe those Googlers did a better job naming that tab than I gave them credit for!).
google-adwords-dimensions-tab4
If you know where to look for them, you can uncover gold nuggets of data that will give you an unfair advantage over your competitors. And while they battle it out and waste money on less profitable clicks, you can focus on the juiciest, most profitable clicks and leads for your business.
So let’s dive in and see what can you discover on the Dimensions tab…

1 – Day of Week

All days are not created equal. If you run a B2B company, you’ll likely find Impressions, Clicks, CTRs, and Conversions dropping off Friday, Saturday and into Sunday. But what if you knew that, on Sundays, conversion rates are higher and your cost per conversion is lower? Well, on the Dimensions tab you can!
Take a look at this screenshot:
Google Adwords Dimension Tab
Notice how the conversion rate on Sunday is a full percentage point higher than the next highest day?
Would that change your bidding strategy? You betcha!
With this information, we’re testing raising our bids on Sundays so the ads appear higher in the rankings and we capture as many impressions/clicks/conversions as possible at a still acceptable cost/conversion.
If you notice a trend like this in your Campaigns, you might also change your ads to specifically mention Sunday (ie. “Sunday Special” or “Help Available on Sundays”) to try to boost CTRs.
And, along those lines, you can create a landing page where let people know you can help them today (Sunday) without waiting until Monday.

2 – Hour of Day

You can also look at performance by the hour of the day.
Check out this screenshot:
Google Adwords Dimensions Tab
Notice how at 5AM, the conversion rate is a paltry 2.71% and the Cost/Conversion is $119.61?
Compare that to 9AM where the conversion rate is over 8% and the Cost/Conversion is $36.79.
Besides adjusting bids by day, in AdWords you can also adjust your bidding by hour of the day. In a situation like you saw above, you could test reducing bids in the early morning hours and increasing them during the more productive times each day.

3 – User Locations/Geographic

This can show you some VERY interesting information. For national campaigns, in particular, knowing which geographic areas perform best/worst can also lead to big improvements in a campaign.
On the Dimensions tab, there are actually 2 tabs related to geography… Geographic and User Locations.
What’s the difference? Well, here’s how Google describes it:

  • Geographic: Your Geographic data shows your customers’ physical locations or locations that they had shown interest in through searches on Google or Google Maps.
  • User location: Your User Location data shows only your customers’ physical locations, regardless of any locations they may be interested in.

Basically, Geographic takes into account a user’s search history along with their physical location.
User location ignores what they’ve searched for and just looks at their physical location.
Below is a screenshot taken from the User Location tab for a client.
google-adwords-dimensions-tab3
You can see that people searching in Kirkland, WA don’t convert very often which leads to a whopping Cost/Conversion of over $425 (in a campaign where the average is just a bit over $50). Not good!
This becomes an even bigger deal now with the Enhanced Campaigns Google rolled out in mid-2013. One of the features of Enhanced Campaigns is to set geographic bid modifiers. So, if there are specific areas that you find are more/less profitable for you, it’s easy to adjust your bids up or down for those areas.
So, using the example above, there are two things you could do.
If you don’t want to completely write off a location, you can simply lower your bids by a percentage. So if you still want ads to show in Kirkland, you can tell Google to reduce bid prices 50% there and see if you can get conversions at a more acceptable cost/conversion.
Or, you can just eliminate the showing of ads to that location completely.

4 – Search Terms

You can run a Search Query Report directly on the Keywords tab of your account as well as see them here on the Dimensions tab.
This report shows you the exact search terms that your prospects typed into Google before clicking on your ads. Unless you’re running a campaign that only has Exact match keywords in it, this Search Term report is one you need to get intimately familiar with.
Why? Here’s an example from a situation I saw recently.
A company was bidding on the keyword “Lead Generation” as a Phrase match. Using a Search Term report, they noticed that a lot of the searches people were finding them on were related to real estate, which wasn’t their target market.
By noticing this and adding negative keywords around “real estate”, they were able to stop spending $100s a month on keywords that had no chance of getting them business and invest those dollars into more relevant search terms. By doing this they doubled their CTRs, increased their conversion rates over 90% and drove a lot more relevant leads their way. Not too shabby!

5 – Automatic Placements

The Search Terms report is important for campaigns running on Search. The Automatic Placements report is a similar report for your campaigns that run on the Google Display Network.
Instead of showing you information on specific search queries, the Automatic Placements report shows you the specific URLs your Display ads appeared on.
Again, the deal here is to eliminate the unprofitable placement URLs that are eating your budget but aren’t getting the results.
And, a little tip here, you’ll generally want to exclude poor performing URLs at the Ad group level, not at the Campaign level. Your different Ad groups in a Display campaign should have different ads and have different targeting options in place. So, just because a URL doesn’t perform well in one Ad group, doesn’t mean it won’t perform well in another.
AdWords is fiercely competitive these days. So how do you come out ahead in your market?
Well, having a website that converts as well as a killer back end that gives you a higher immediate customer value than your competition is a big part of it.
But you gotta have a well-oiled AdWords machine too.
And one of the keys to achieving that is segmentation… which is exactly what the areas of the Dimensions tab we discussed above lets you do.
By using this data buried in the Dimensions tab, you can let your less savvy competitors fight over the unprofitable AdWords clicks (ie. segments) in your market while you optimize the hell outta the golden clicks that bring in the cash!

Adam Kreitman

Adam Kreitman

Adam Kreitman is the co-founder of PPCAuditXMen.com. The site offers audits from some of the top paid search pros around and guarantees a 30% increase in performance within 3 months. Follow him on Google+

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