We’re forever checking clients Adwords accounts, to optimise and improve on them. One tab we use a lot for high-level management is the dimensions tab. This tab we have found is often under-utilised by business owners that manage their own accounts so we thought we would highlight it to you so that you too can take advantage of the stats that it shows you.

As there is quite a lot of information in the dimensions tab, we’ll take a look at just two dimensions in this blog. the first one is

Reach and Frequency

This is particularly useful if you are running a display campaign. It enables you to see how many people saw your ads, but more importantly how many times they saw them over a certain period. So

Reach = the number of people that saw your ad

Frequency = the minimum amount of times one person saw your ad over a specified period of time.

You could see how this information could be useful, if the frequency of your Ad is over-optimised then you could implement frequency capping where you can dictate the maximum number of impressions you want over a period of time. This is especially important if you are re-marketing because if your advert is seen too much you could appear to be like ‘Big Brother’ so you might want to scale this back a bit.

Of course, the reverse might also be true, if the users only see your advert once, then your ad is under-utilised, so you might want to think about increasing your bids or expanding out your campaign to increase the frequency.

You can choose to see this information by day, week or month… and don’t be surprised if you see decimals in some of the numbers. This information isn’t exact data, but compiled using data from a sample group that is then scaled across the campaign. Still worth a visit if you are on the display network

Time

Without a doubt, this is my favourite tab in dimensions as it enables you to see your campaigns based on

  • hours of the day
  • days of the week
  • days
  • weeks
  • months
  • quarters
  • years

This report will enable you to see your campaigns results down to an hour. You can start to make some effective decisions based on this information. Does your campaign work better on certain days? or probably more importantly, certain times of the day. If you see certain trends taking place, you can maximise your budget by setting bid adjusters for these peak times. If there are certain times of day when the traffic is low, perhaps you could do the reverse.

In extremely competitive markets advertisers are getting really smart with this information and will have their campaigns tweaked hour by hour, so if you want to keep up then this is something you need to be aware of.

Your Takeaway

If you are running your own PPC campaign, spend just ten minutes looking at one of these reports. (if you are running the display network, I would choose the Reach and Frequency, on the search network the time report is better) Get to grip with the information that is being presented to you and what it means for your marketing campaigns…. Take action, you could vastly improve your return on investment if you do.