A Walkthrough of Megalytic’s New AdWords Integration

By Megalytic Staff - June 23, 2015

You spend your day managing AdWords campaigns. Actually, it’s more than that. You’re a master of Google’s search and display networks—modifying and updating bids to constantly achieve the best results. It’s your job to deliver not just any traffic, but traffic that converts as economically as possible.
And you’re good at it!
But, in today’s digital marketing world, it is not enough to just be good. You need to communicate your success to others. That means providing your boss or client with regular reports that prove performance and that show worth—not only yours, but the worth of the campaigns you’re running.
Historically, producing these reports has been kind of a drag. Cutting and pasting screenshots from AdWords is ugly. Exporting the data to Excel and creating your own charts and graphs is a massive time suck.
Now, there is a better way.
Megalytic is excited to announce a new integration with Adwords that will allow you to create beautiful AdWords performance reports in a fraction of the time it takes to produce them manually.
Let’s take a walkthrough of this new AdWords integration.

 

AdWords Integration with Megalytic

 

Connecting A Megalytic Account to AdWords

If you don’t already have a Megalytic account, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial (no credit card required) to start using the new features. Once you create your account, you will be asked to connect with Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools or Google AdWords.

 

Connect to AdWords Account

 

Click on the Google AdWords logo and a window will open asking you to authorize Megalytic to have access to your AdWords data. Make sure you are logged into the Google account that you use to manage AdWords (e.g., your MCC account – if you manage multiple AdWords accounts for clients) – as indicated by the email address in the upper right corner.

 

Authentication Step 2

 

When you click on the “Accept” button, a screen will appear showing each AdWords account you have access to (this will be a single account, unless you are logged in with your MCC email). You can select one or more to connect with Megalytic.

 

Authentication Step 2

 

Once you click on “Connect,” Megalytic will automatically generate your first AdWords report, and take you to your workspace. Here, you will see the report titled “Sample Google AdWords Report” on the left hand side of the screen helping you to get started.

Let’s explore its contents to learn about Megalytic’s AdWords reporting features.

 

Megalytic Dashboard with Single Report

 

Exploring and Customizing an AdWords Report

To see the contents of this sample report, scroll down. In Megalytic, data is presented using Widgets. The first widget you’ll see is titled “AdWords KPIs Last Month” and it shows four AdWords Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across all the Campaigns in your AdWords account. By default, the KPIs shown are Clicks, Click Through Rate (CTR), Average Cost per Click (Avg. CPC) and Conversions.

The top row displays the KPIs for last month, while the middle and bottom rows show comparative values for the previous month and the same month last year. In the example below, for instance, you can see that Clicks are up 2.44% from last month, and 575.56% from the same month last year. Conversions, on the other hand, are down 32.23% from last month, and up 355.56% from last year.

 

Megalytic Reporing AdWords KPIs

 

KPIs are a great way to begin a monthly AdWords report because they immediately show the reader the top-line performance and set the context for the rest of the report.

Customizing the Default AdWords Metrics

Should you want to use different metrics as your KPIs, Megalytic makes it easy to change the defaults. Suppose, for example, that rather than CTR and Avg. CPC, you need to show the total Cost (AdWords Spend) and the Cost per Conversion. To make this change, open the Widget Editor by clicking on the gear in the upper left corner. Then, scroll down to the Metric selector, uncheck CTR and Avg. CPC, and check the metrics Cost and Cost / converted clicks. Lastly, click “Apply Selection” to show the newly selected metrics.

 

Changing the AdWords KPI Metric Defaults

 

You can also change the ordering of the metrics by dragging them up or down from within the widget editor.

 

Megalytic Re-Arrange Columns

 

After selecting your metrics and dragging the columns into the proper order, the modified widget looks like this.

 

AdWords KPIs in Megalytic after Customization

 

Megalytic Presents AdWords Data in Widgets

As already noted, Megalytic relies on widgets to clearly present data. The widget we’ve just been looking at is called the Multi-KPI Widget–because it displays multiple KPIs across a single row.

Scrolling down in the sample report, we encounter two additional widgets: the Notes Widget, and two side-by-side KPI Widgets.

The Notes Widget allows you to enter and format free form text in your reports. The text you add to a report to explain or expand upon insights can be as important as the data for communicating key insights to readers and proving your success. Because of this, Megalytic provides a versatile widget for editing the text portion of your reports.

The KPI Widget is similar to the Multi-KPI Widget that we just looked at, but it enables you to highlight details about a single metric. It includes a sparkline chart that provides graphical insight into performance over time.

 

Using Megalytic Notes with KPI Widgets

 

Megalytic’s Widget Library – The AdWords Widgets

In addition to customizing the widgets in the sample report, you can add new widgets from Megalytic’s Widget Library. To see the AdWords widgets that are available in the library, click on the “+ Add Widget” button, and enter “adwords” into the search filter at the top of the library.

You will then see two types of AdWords widgets in the filtered results. The orange ones are Google Analytics Widgets that present data from an AdWords account that has been linked with the Google Analytics account.

The second group of widgets (these show the AdWords logo in the background) are the Direct AdWords Widgets that connect directly to your AdWords account.

 

AdWords Widgets in the Megalytic Widget Library

 

As you can see, the four Direct AdWords Widgets are:

  • AdWords Campaigns
  • AdWords KPI
  • AdWords Multi-KPI
  • AdWords Networks

These four widgets are the ones used in the sample report we’ve been exploring. To add any of these widgets to a report, simply drag them from the widget library onto the report at the position where you want to insert them.

We’ve just looked at the Multi-KPI and KPI widgets. To explore the AdWords Campaign Widget, close the library by clicking the “X Close Library” button at the top of the screen, and scroll down to the next chart in the sample report titled “Top 3 Campaigns by AdWords Clicks.”

AdWords Campaign Widget

In this case, the very versatile AdWords Campaign Widget has been configured as a line chart showing the performance of your AdWords account’s top three campaigns over the last year.

 

Megalytic's AdWords Campaign Widget

 

This widget can also represent your AdWords campaign data using a bar chart, pie charts, tables, etc. To change the chart type used to display data, simply click on the gear in the upper left corner to open the widget editor, and select the desired chart type.

 

AdWords Campaigns in Pie Chart

 

Ad Group, Ad and Keyword Reporting

You can also configure the AdWords Campaign widget to report on Ad groups, Ads and Keywords. Within the widget editor, there is a Dimension selector where you can pick the reporting dimension.

 

Megalytic Feature for Selecting AdWords Campaign Dimension for Reporting

 

When you select one of the other dimensions, you will have the opportunity to filter that dimension by Campaign and Ad group. For example, below, we have selected the Keyword dimension, and filtered by the “Search – General” campaign. This configures the widget to report Keyword data for the single campaign “Search – General.” Under “Chart type,” we have selected “Table” to display the keyword data in a tabular format.

 

Filtering Keywords with Megalytic's AdWords Widgets

 

Closing the widget editor, we can now see that this widget is reporting keyword data in a table with columns for: Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Avg. CPC. As with the Multi-KPI widget discussed above, these default columns can be changed using the selector inside the widget editor.

 

AdWords Keyword Table in Megalytic

 

Comparing AdWords Performance Across Time Periods

Like most Megalytic widgets, the AdWords widgets can be used to compare performance across time periods to create charts and tables that display month-over-month or year-over-year performance.

For example, you can configure that AdWords Campaign Widget to display performance by campaign–comparing this month with last month. This type of information is particularly relevant and engaging for the marketing team, because the business is always interested in how advertising spend is performing from month to month.

 

AdWords Month over Month Comparison in Megalytic

 

Network, Device, and Click-Type Reporting

Many of us use AdWords to advertise on multiple Google networks: Google search, Google Display and Search partners. We are also interested in reporting on AdWords clicks by device (e.g., mobile vs desktop) and click-type (e.g., Sitelink vs Headline). For reporting these statistics, Megalytic provides the AdWords Networks Widget.

You can use this widget, for example, to show the month-over-month performance of your AdWords campaigns across the different Google advertising networks. In the sample report generated when you created your account, you will find this table near the end. In this case, it shows that while traffic from the paid search networks declined from April to May, traffic from the display network increased dramatically–by over 130%.

 

AdWords Networks Reported in Megalytic

 

Marketers are also very interested in understanding how their advertising is performing on mobile devices. By opening the widget editor and switching the dimension from Network to Device, this same widget can be used to report on advertising performance across device types.

In the example below, you can see that while desktop (Computers) advertising performance declined from April to May, mobile device clickthrough was up 450%.

 

AdWords Device Clicks Reporting in Megalytic

 

Conclusion

Megalytic’s new AdWords integration enables analysts and marketers to provide detailed reporting on AdWords campaign performance. Beyond just aggregate numbers, Megalytics enables you to drill down and report on individual Campaigns, Ad groups, Ads and sets of Keywords.

Megalytic has earned a reputation as a powerful reporting solution for Google Analytics, and, with this integration, the tool brings the same power and convenience to AdWords reporting.

To try out Megalytic, sign up for our free 14-day trial (no credit card required).

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