Module 3 - General things to notice in Google ads

What's the first thing to understand about the Google Ads interface?

The date range set in the top corner of the screen applies to everything you're looking at, so it's easy to accidentally be reviewing data from a period in the past without realising it. Options include today, yesterday, this week, the last seven days or all time, and there's also a compare function, so setting it to the last week and clicking compare will show this week against last week side by side, with the differences in conversions and clicks visible straight away.

How should you navigate the campaign menu?

Using the filter set to "all enabled" rather than "all" is generally the better default, because if an account has a lot of history, showing every paused campaign as well makes the whole view confusing. Viewing by campaign type splits everything into display, video, discovery or search, which makes it quick to jump straight to whichever type of campaign needs attention. From there, clicking into campaigns brings up the list of campaign names, and clicking further into a campaign shows the individual ads running underneath it, along with status and other details.

The structure underneath a campaign is ad groups, and it works in a very similar way to Facebook Ads, likely because Facebook borrowed the idea from Google Ads, so anyone familiar with one interface should find the other reasonably intuitive.

How do you customise the columns to see what matters?

The columns in the ads interface can be fully customised through the columns menu, where you can add things such as viewable impressions, conversions or conversion value over cost. There's more data available here than anyone could realistically use, so the advice is to find the conversion events that matter for your business, set your columns up around those once, save that view, and avoid overcomplicating things beyond that.

What can you learn from placements, audiences and demographics?

Within a campaign, audiences can be broken down by demographics such as age group, gender, parental status and, in the US, household income. Looking at how ads performed across these combinations can reveal, for example, that one age and gender combination has a noticeably higher view rate than others. Placements show every YouTube channel and video an ad has actually appeared on, which is genuinely useful for profiling an audience, because conversions don't always come from someone watching content directly related to your topic, they might come from a completely different type of content altogether.

Why does the change history matter?

The change history section shows exactly what adjustments have been made to a campaign over time, including bid changes, which is useful for understanding whether a shift in performance lines up with something that was actually changed, rather than something happening on its own.

What's the overall takeaway from a tour of the interface?

Keep it simple: remember the menu structure down the left-hand side, and always keep an eye on the date range in the top right, because that single setting determines every piece of data you're looking at throughout the account.