New Interface Thursdays: All about filters
April 23rd, 2009 | Published in Google Adwords
Have you used filters in the new AdWords interface yet? Filters allow you to look at just the data you want within your account. You can use filters throughout your account and save them for later use.
Let's take a look at some of the cool things you can do with filters. First, no matter what tab you're in, you'll find filters under Filter and views.
(click to view larger image)
Setting up a filter is the same whether you're working with ad groups, keywords, or placement; though, the criteria you can filter by does depend on what you're trying to filter. For example, you can filter keywords by match type, but you can't filter ad groups by match type.
(click to view larger image)
To set up a filter, just specify the criteria you want. You can add additional rules to make your filter more specific. For example, you can set filters for clickthrough rate (CTR) and average position at the same time to see keywords with a high CTR appearing on the second page of search results. If you want to re-use the same filter repeatedly, you can save it by checking the Save Filter box.
Let's say we'd like to find high performing keywords across our account. Rather than hunting down all the keywords from ad group to ad group, we can just filter for high performance. Let's look for keywords with a CTR greater than 2% and conversion rate of at least 5%.
(click to view larger image)
Then, after we've filtered the list, we can make changes to our high performing keywords directly in the results table instead of having to click through to each ad group one by one.
Another place you might find filters very handy is in the Ads tab, which displays all your ads across your account, campaign, or ad group. Here's a way you could use filters to get better insight into your campaigns:
The Google Store has campaigns with two types of landing pages: product pages for a specific product like this t-shirt, and category pages for entire groups like all wearables. We'd like to know which type of page generates more sales. Since the URLs for our product pages are formatted differently than the URLs for our category pages, we can create a filter to show only ads that have category landing pages by filtering for destination URLs that start with http://www.googlestore.com/category.asp?
(click to view larger image)
With this filter, it's easy to see performance across all ads that drive traffic to our category pages. We can compare this to the performance we see on product pages. For the Google Store, we found that the category pages generate more sales than the product pages-- information that will help us improve our campaigns.
With filters on the Ads tab, you can also quickly identify ads with a specific approval status. This is a quick way to identify all pending or disapproved ads across your account.
(click to view larger image)
As you can see, filters have a lot of possible uses. We encourage you to try looking at your campaigns in different ways. You might be surprised at what you find. Happy filtering.