Google announced today new features in their Adwords product, campaign groups and performance targets, both intended to make it easier for you to track and forecast the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Campaign Groups
The new campaign groups feature allows you to group all of your Google ad campaigns including search, shopping, display and YouTube all into one campaign, making them easier to track and improve. Google is envisioning marketers using this grouping to track marketing themes across their network of ad opportunities.
They gave an example of a theoretical campaign called “Holiday Launch” where you can easily link your YouTube advertising stats with your ecommerce and search data.
Performance Targets
The performance targets feature improves on your ability within Adwords to set goals and track clicks and conversions by campaign group. Combining performance targets with the new campaign groups feature lets you set target clicks and conversions across Google’s network of marketing platforms.
“Tell us how many clicks or conversions you want to receive, how much you want to spend, and what average CPC or CPA you wish to maintain,” noted Jon Diorio, Product Manager of Google AdWords. “We’ll then automatically show you a single view of how your campaign group is performing against those goals, and what we think you’ll likely achieve by the end of the campaign period.”
Diorio said that these feature will not alter how Google serves your ads or optimize your campaigns, but simply offers advertisers better evaluation tools.
Google let some advertisers try the new features prior to their public release today. “Previously I needed to export all my campaigns into a spreadsheet, group them together, and create a pivot table simply to see how they are performing,” said Oleg Monakhov, Senior Lead Generation Manager at Wrike. “With campaign groups & performance targets, we can much more easily see how our groups are performing relative to our goals, all from within the AdWords interface.”