14 DAY TRIAL // Google is always expanding its product lineup, but at the end of the day, it still makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising. As such, it's always looking to come up with better tools for advertisers, even though it dominates the market. One interesting feature that is being released over the next few weeks is a new reporting tool dubbed AdWords Search Funnels.
"In order to help you make more informed decisions about your AdWords keywords, ad groups, and campaigns, we're excited to release a new set of reports for your AdWords account: AdWords Search Funnels (beta)," Miles Johnson from Google's Inside AdWords crew announced.
"Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad someone clicks before making a conversion, masking the fact that many customers perform multiple searches before finally converting. AdWords Search Funnels help you see the full picture by giving you insight into the ads your customers interact with during their shopping process," he explained.
The feature makes a lot of sense for advertisers wanting to understand their customers better. By having a more complete look at how the user got to make a purchase on their sites, advertisers can better target their campaigns and see what keywords perform better than others not just for the actual conversion, but in the entire shopping process.
For example, a user may do a query at some point and get an ad from a particular site. The user may not click on the ad at that point and may do a little more research in the process. Later, the same user could enter a different query and again get an ad for the same site and this time click on it. Normally, the advertiser would have no way of knowing about the first ad and may decide that the keyword used is not a very effective one. With AdWords Search Funnels, advertisers get the complete picture.
It should be noted that Google takes quite a few steps to ensure the user's privacy. Advertisers don't get access to the actual queries, instead they get a list of relevant keywords. "Non-popular" queries are also left out of the report to further anonymize the data.