Thatâs Segment-ertainment

It's hidden away on the ads tab, but enables you to see important information that is not visible anywhere else.

Picture the scene - you're analysing ad performance for a client who is just looking to bring quality traffic to their site, and come across the following data in an ad group:

Looking at this, you might be inclined to introduce a new ad, perhaps using elements of Ad 1 and Ad 3, and pause Ad 2 as it has the lowest CTR.

This illustrates a difficulty we have in AdWords, where although we can see which ads work best for each ad group, it is not necessarily clear which ads work best for each keyword. This means we can be in danger of making decisions based on only partial data and sticking with ads that are only good in some circumstances (and vice versa).

So What's The Solution?

Enter the Keyword/Placement segment (only found under segments in the ads tab). Select it and displayed in all its glory will be the performance of individual keywords for each ad. While AdWords data still remains only the second best thing you can segment (the first obvs being a Chocolate Orange – big shout out to Terry), it's really closing the gap with this one. I admit that this is not a particularly new feature in AdWords, but its singular location means it often goes unnoticed and therefore unused.

So, for the example above, the best performing keywords are:

And, by segmenting the ad performance data, we get:

Therefore, we can see that actually the majority of the clicks for Keyword 2 come through Ad 2, so removing this ad could actually be detrimental to the performance of the ad group. It may instead be worth considering moving Keyword 2 and Ad 2 into their own ad group, along with other related elements.

How Will This Help Me?

While there are likely to be many more situations in which it would be useful, a list of key uses for the segment are as follows:

- Looking to see which keywords should be moved into a different ad group because they perform best with a specific ad.

- Seeing which keywords are working best when using dynamic keyword insertion (DKI).

- Looking to see if there is any difference in keyword performance between mobile targeted and non-mobile targeted ads.

Now I agree it hasn't necessarily been designed with ease of use in mind, but if a lot of your traffic is coming through a small number of keyword/ad combinations, then the insights you could get would definitely be worth the extra effort - given expected clickthrough rate of a keyword/ad combo is one of the major determining factors of QS, results from this kind of analysis could be really beneficial in efforts to increase QS and therefore reduce CPC.

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