Google Ads Dashboard Overview & Metrics to Include

In our modern era, search engines are a gateway to the internet. They act as the spine of society by connecting us to an abundance of knowledge, which is why we rely so heavily on them in our daily lives. When it comes to running a business, it’s essential to understand the ways that search engines impact the lives of your customers.

Google is the king of search engines. As of January 2022, Google ranked among the most visited multi-platform web properties in the US, with close to 260 million unique US visitors. Google also holds most of the market share (61.4%) among all leading US search engine providers. The numbers tell the entire story. Google is one of the most prominent features in the daily routines of your customers, which means your business needs to determine how to advertise on the platform. 

This dominance is why Google Ads is crucial for any successful digital marketing campaign and why a Google Ads dashboard can help you see deeper into those campaign efforts. In this article, you’ll learn what a Google Ads dashboard is, why your business needs it, and how to set yours up with the metrics required for success.

What Is a Google Ads Dashboard?

Google Ads is a service that allows you to promote your business, sell products or services, increase awareness, or drive traffic to your website. This online advertising platform lets advertisers and digital marketing experts bid to display their service offerings, product listings, or landing pages to web users. The platform will place ads in the SERPs of Google, other search engines, other websites, and mobile apps. 

A Google Ads dashboard is a centralized hub where you can track and measure all the most important metrics related to your Google Ads account. You can create these dashboards using external tools like Google Analytics or a reporting tool that pulls in that data. Google Ads is continually offering new ad formats to optimize, so having a tool to pull in all data from different campaigns and efforts automatically can reduce headaches.

Google Ads was formerly known as Google Adwords. You might have heard a Google Ads dashboard called an Adwords dashboard or a Google Adwords dashboard. These are interchangeable terms.

These dashboards display data directly pulled from Google Ads and compiled into a single secure location. This way, instead of wading through hundreds of rows and columns, you can easily visualize the metrics you’re tracking. Inserting abundant data into an easily digestible format is the best way to make insights actionable. 

Creating a centralized dashboard can be particularly helpful if you manage multiple Google Ads accounts. 

5 Benefits of a Google Ads Dashboard

Digital marketing professionals have to deal with many things every month. Tasks include creating content, managing teams, and keeping clients in the loop. All of that can come to a stressful boiling point when the time comes to send reports to your stakeholders. 

1. Stakeholder Communication

If you work for clients, you may have to send hundreds of compiled reports and talk through complicated metrics so that everyone is on the same page. If you work in-house, you might need to send many layered and complex pieces of data to your executive team and stakeholders. 

A Google Ads dashboard can make reporting week significantly easier. If done correctly, a dashboard allows you to communicate the most critical metrics easily. Instead of your stakeholders having to browse through pages or reports, log into multiple tools, and try and understand complex numbers, you can streamline the entire process with a dashboard. 

2. Internal Communication

Dashboards can also do wonders for internal communication. When managing a marketing team, you’re constantly juggling many components simultaneously. It can be easy to drop the ball when it comes to communication, but the consequences of not being on the same page with your team can be costly. 

Miscommunication can lead to a lack of collaboration on campaigns, delays in content execution, missed deliverables, and stalls in cash flow. With a Google Ads dashboard, you and your team can sync up on your goals and stay in touch with real-time data updates. Since our modern era moves quickly, your website analytics shift rapidly. To make real-time decisions, you need to have real-time updates. 

Your Google Ads dashboard can facilitate that.

3. Data Visualization

For many marketing professionals, the last thing you want to deal with is an abundance of numbers. When delivering on and executing complicated campaigns, you may not have the time to understand the relationship between your number of unique visitors and your conversion rate. 

Data visualization is crucial. Rather than deal with spreadsheets exclusively, you can leverage the power of a visual dashboard. The point of a Google Ads dashboard is to bring your data to life in an easily-digestible way. 

4. Targeted Campaigns

Metrics alone aren’t enough to generate actionable insights. The difference between digital marketing professionals who see consistent success and those who feel like their success varies from campaign to campaign is that the former understand this principle. 

Something that sets dashboards apart from spreadsheets is that you can easily visualize the relationship between one metric to another. For example, you can observe the number of unique visitors your site sees in a month next to your conversion rate and determine if there’s a correlation.

Understanding the relationship between metrics can be critical to improving your Google Ads efforts and reporting. It can help you refine your target audience and better target your unique campaigns. Grasping these relationships can also aid your team in updating and further refining existing campaigns.

5. Automated Reporting

A Google Ads dashboard automatically updates through an API. It provides you, your team, and your stakeholders with up-to-date information and data. Some of the metrics you pull in will be stagnant, which means they update daily or at designated intervals. Others are real-time, which means your dashboard constantly updates with real-time data for you to make real-time decisions. 

Automation is one of the reasons that your dashboard can be considered your primary source of truth for your organization. This is the pathway forward if you’ve been looking to shift into making data-driven decisions. The automated reporting aspect is crucial because you can’t commit to making data-driven choices if you don’t constantly have a reliable source of truth from which to pull. 

Because Google Ads dashboards offer real-time reporting, it allows marketing professionals to focus on providing their stakeholders with actionable insights and immediate answers. 

What Metrics Should You Include in a Google Ads Dashboard?

A Google Ads dashboard is only as effective as the metrics you choose to track. When setting up your dashboard, consider which data pieces are the most impactful to your organization or your stakeholders. Do you need to gather information on a recent campaign or overall website performance? Are you tracking goals? Conversions? Sessions?

Once you narrow down your specific intentions, it can help you decide which metrics to include. Here are four metrics we recommend adding to your first Google Ads dashboard to cover the basics.

1. Impressions

Your website impressions are how often a Google Ads paid ad has been encountered on the SERPs. If you’re running a specific campaign to increase awareness, this is one of the most critical metrics to put on your dashboard. It’s related to the level of interest in search terms related to the brand. You can also use this metric for insights into search volume trends.

2. Clicks

This is self-explanatory—a click is counted each time a user clicks on your website link in an ad. A click might be on the header of the paid search ad or any extensions supported by Google Ads. Those could include elements such as featured products or locations. 

To accurately monitor campaign performance, this is one of those must-have metrics. A click is often a sign that a user is curious enough to learn more about the brand’s offering, be that a product or a service. 

3. CPC

CPC stands for cost-per-click. It refers to the amount you’re charged (on average) for someone to click on a Google Ad. Tracking this metric on your dashboard can be incredibly beneficial because your CPC can change daily. It’s linked to Google’s real-time algorithm, so there’s little benefit to comparing it week-over-week. 

Keeping an eye on this one is helpful, though, because the lower the cost, the more effective your campaign can be at reaching more of your target audience within your designated budget.

4. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate should be the main target of any campaign. You might already be familiar with your conversion rate, but placing it on your dashboard is an excellent way to visualize how your conversions are affected by other metrics. This is especially true because Google Ads can report on different conversion events, which might include: 

• Mobile ad calls
• Purchases
• Custom goals
• And more

You can choose to visualize your conversions based on the ad itself, the keyword level, or the campaign level. Keep track of your marketing dollars by including this metric on your dashboard. 

Simplify Google Ads Tracking with Improvado

If you’re looking for the best way to streamline Google Ads tracking, Improvado has the solution. It’s an advanced marketing analytics solution that can automate your entire marketing reporting. You can save your team lots of time, bypass the vendor lock issue, and gain access to reports you know you can trust. 

Improvado’s ETL solution makes it so that you can:

• Automatically pull data from multiple sources,
• Transform data,
• Unify disparate naming conventions,
• Eliminate duplicate data entries,
• Map data,
• Push analysis-ready data to any BI, analysis, or data visualization tool.

Improvado saves time, minimizes the likelihood of errors, offers real-time data, cuts time to insight, and more. Your organization can take advantage of our expert team and allow us to build your Google Ads dashboard. To find out more, book a 30-min consultation today.