Occasionally, AdWords likes to add in nifty new features to its interface that even the most on-the-ball search marketers never really notice until a few months later, when they suddenly ask themselves (or the entire office at large), “Has this always been here?”

Such is the story of the new Segments feature, which AdWords first implemented in November of 2009 under the Filter tab.

Now, though, it gets a tab of its very own, sandwiched between All but Deleted Keywords and the aforementioned Filter tabs. Just click on that handy dandy little Segments tab, and you can sort all your performance data by network, day, week, month, quarter, year, day of the week, click type, device, and… oh, that’s it?

I think you get the picture.

Needless to say, this is a really cool and versatile new feature, made even cooler by the fact that it saves a lot of time as well. Instead of going through and selecting one day or week or month at a time in the date range in order to view your data, you can view it all at once and, blessedly, compare numbers without having to lay a finger on Excel.

Of course, since the initial discovery and subsequent whoas, we here at Engine Ready have been putting the new Segments tab to use. So far, we’ve mostly been segmenting by week, so that we can get a really good picture of why performance increases or decreases week to week. To do this, select a month (or two or three) as your date range, then segment by week. You end up getting something that looks like this:

Each of the four weeks of data is broken down, so that you can easily take a look at the changes in cost per click, conversion rate, position, and anything else that might be affecting your account’s performance. Which makes it much simpler to answer the question: why?

Which makes it much, much simpler to go for the impossible: true optimization.

Adwords, Analytics, Google AdWords, PPC

There is a list of do and don’t when it comes to building a website or redoing an existing one. But have you ever thought about how these decisions can affect your online marketing? This post is intended for the decision makers of businesses, those who might have so many things on their plate that sometimes the obvious questions get skipped over.

One specific I’d like to bring up is the process of picking a shopping cart. In the past couple of months, we have come across shopping carts that do not host 3^rd party analytics or at least the shopping cart customer service says this. Meaning the shopping cart will not support the analytics to track your online marketing efforts such as PPC, Organic Search, and Email Blasts.

But if your website is dependent upon ppc marketing, email blasts, organic rankings, banner ads, etc it is even more imperative to keep track of these channels. The great advantage to online marketing is the ability to track your leads or sales.

Okay, I know most of you already know this and the importance of tracking so I’ll get to the point. For those in the position to make the final decisions…you may want to ask the shopping cart vendor if they’ll support 3^rd party tracking from the get go. Below is a quick check off list to help you on your way.

1.       Do you support 3^rd party tracking?

2.       Who will or is allowed to implement the tracking?

3.       Is there additional cost if the shopping cart vendor installs the tracking?

Analytics, Shopping Cart, tracking