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Google Ads Dashboards in 2023

wpx_admin — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 00:18:47 +0000

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.

SEO Dashboards In 2023

Ryan England — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 00:14:13 +0000

Search Engine Optimization is a complicated process with many moving parts. An SEO dashboard helps you see all relevant metrics in one place. With search engine data alongside important metrics from Google Analytics, you can see a complete picture of SEO’s contribution to your digital marketing.

Why You Need An SEO Dashboard

Not everyone is willing to log into Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and all the SEO platforms you can access. A dashboard for key stakeholders gives them a high-level overview of performance, although a section to provide insights can make your dashboard even more useful.

SEO is a long-term strategy. Be sure to include trended reports to clearly identify trends in your dashboard over time. In your dashboard, be sure to include organic traffic and conversion over time, traffic by landing page, and ranking keywords in the organic search results. Customize the dashboard for your digital marketing efforts, as a dashboard unique to your specific situation is infinitely more useful than a generic one.

Using Looker Studio For SEO Dashboard

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are two of the main SEO data sources you’ll be using to populate your SEO reports. Since they are both Google products, they are easy to connect to looker studio, and you can be confident the connection will always be supported.

Looker Studio also connects to Google Sheets, an easy and free way to store data pasted from SEO tools. It also removes the need to pay for and/or learn the APIs from those tools. If you prefer the automated approach for your SEO metrics, most tools can automatically pull data into Google Sheets or Looker Studio with just a few clicks. I prefer to pull all of my data into Google Sheets first, including Google Analytics, where I can clean up the data before bringing it into Looker.

SEO Dashboard Templates

Coming Soon…

Data Sources

SEO dashboards are not one-size-fits-all. Google Analytics and Search Console should be foundational in your SEO dashboard displays, but plenty of data sources are available to track SEO performance. Choose the platforms that fit your own data and your marketing team best.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is my primary reporting data source for SEO performance. Keyword rankings are useful for understanding how SEO is directionally doing, but using Google Analytics data to track organic search traffic performance on your site is the best indicator. At the end of the day, organic traffic and conversions are major reasons for doing search engine optimization in the first place.

The reports should be filtered down to only show organic search traffic. Google/organic is likely the main traffic source/medium, but it’s worth including other search engines, like Bing, as they should also improve. The important metrics you should look at include engagement (engagement rate, bounce rate, session duration, etc.) and conversion (purchases, leads, conversion rate, and other key performance indicators).

Organic Search traffic, user behavior/engagement, and conversion metrics should be trended over time. SEO takes time, so looking at the trends over the longer-term better shows the impact of your SEO efforts. We don’t need to duplicate everything available within the platform, as some items are better viewed inside your Google Analytics account.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console shows data directly from Google’s search engine results. You can see the queries and pages receiving impressions and the average position and click-through rate for those terms. Results from an SEO campaign don’t happen overnight, so the Google Search Console data is an excellent leading indicator of performance—total impressions and average position increase, leading to clicks and organic traffic.

Google Search Console offers many more search engine optimization features, although I generally don’t bring those into my SEO dashboard. I find going into my Google Search Console account a better place to review these items, especially in the Page Experience, Core Web Vitals, and Mobile Usability reports. Google usually emails when a technical issue arises, so it’s pretty easy to stay on top of issues that could affect your SEO strategy.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is the tool I use most to pull SEO data into my Looker Studio SEO Dashboard. The APIs from SEO tools are expensive, so most times, it’s easier to copy and paste key metrics into a Google Sheet. This is extra helpful in client reporting when authority metrics and keyword rankings are the only data used from the SEO tools.

Google Sheets are also great for lining up data from multiple sources. If I took website traffic from organic search that entered on a specific landing page and wanted to line it up with the keywords those landing pages rank for, I could easily do that with a Google Sheet. Trying to handle that with blended data in Looker Studio sounds like a nightmare, and I recommend the most straightforward way to track SEO performance.

SEO Platforms / Keyword Tools

SEM Rush

SEM Rush is the SEO platform I most often use in my SEO Reporting. Their $230/m Guru plan lets you see historical data for keyword rankings, which is great for backfilling a client report. You can also create keyword rank lists to track how those specific terms rank in the search results over time. API access is only available on their Business plan, starting at $450/m.

Ahrefs

My favorite SEO platform for keyword research and backlink analysis. Their $199/m Standard plan provides six months of keyword ranking history, while their $399 Advanced Plan provides two years. Their Advanced plan offers their Google Looker Studio connector access, but the API is only available on their $999/m Enterprise plan.

Moz

I haven’t used Moz for several years, outside of their Local SEO plan used by a few of my clients. From what I remember, it did a decent job of tracking keyword rankings and completing a site audit, but in my opinion, their data is less useful for SEO dashboards than the two platforms above. I don’t see anything on their pricing page about historical keyword rankings or API access, but I’m sure this tool could work for SEO reporting if it was the only option available.

Other Tools

There must be hundreds of other SEO platforms used by digital marketing teams worldwide. I’m most familiar with the ones mentioned above, although there are many other reliable sources for important SEO metrics. Choose the platform you’re most comfortable with, and best of luck with your SEO success!

FAQs

What is an SEO dashboard?

An SEO dashboard is a great way to show SEO Analytics data in one place. This should clearly display organic traffic, top landing pages, and ranking keywords. Providing key insights or details of your marketing efforts is always helpful, especially for client reporting.

How do I create an SEO dashboard?

The easiest way to create an SEO dashboard is to find a template and copy your own data into it. You can customize this dashboard to your needs based on your marketing campaigns.

What are my top converting keywords?

Google Analytics used to show the specific keywords driving conversions, although that stopped nearly a decade ago. You can align keyword rank data with conversions data from organic search landing pages, but that would be directional at best. Google Ads lets you see all the keyword data you want (for now…)