Dimensions Tab

The dimensions tab within AdWords is your go-to area to segment conversion data. It allows you to view data for Account, Campaign or Ad Group levels. It lets you dissect the data in various different ways to help you get a better idea of what is actually going on, without having to export the data as an external AdWords report.

The data is displayed for the selected time range, and for the selected campaign or ad group. There is a huge amount of segmentation that can be done here, with all sorts of insights that can be gleaned using the various reports. If you haven’t run a campaign yet, read about creating a campaign in 5 minutes.

So how do you find it? Just select the desired campaign(s) or ad group(s) from the tree on the left, and head over to the dimensions tab.

Screenshot of dimensions tab to change view in AdWords

Within the Dimensions tab—directly under the Campaigns tab in the top-nav—there are options that let you change the type of data being displayed, all of which can be done via the View Button.

Screenshot of drop down menu for different views in AdWords

We’ll go through each way of segmenting the data and what it means.


Conversion

Conversion Category

This is where you can segment your data by the category, or type, of conversion. The data displayed here will depend on how you categorised your conversions when you set them up i.e. Purchase/Sale, Sign-Up, Lead, View of a key page or Other. This is particularly useful if you are measuring multiple types of conversions, such as product sales and newsletter sign-ups.

Conversion

This is similar to Conversion Category, however it segregates the conversion data by the name that you assigned to each conversion while setting them up.


Labels

With this view, you can see the data related to parts of your account that have been labelled. Anything without a label will not be included in these metrics. It can be segmented in four layers:

Labels—Keyword

See data for all keywords that have labels applied to them.

Labels—Ad

See data for all ads that have labels applied to them.

Labels—Ad Group

See data for all ad groups that have labels applied to them.

Labels—Campaign

See data for all campaigns that have labels applied to them.


Time

Part of your AdWords optimisation should be to ensure that your Bids & Ads etc. are optimised based on time of the day or day of the week. In the Time section of the Dimensions tab, you will be able to see all the data to help you make optimisations like this.

Do remember that any dayparting or time scheduling you currently have in place will affect what data you see here, and may somewhat skew the average.

The time section can be further segmented in seven different ways:

Day of the week

See the data segmented by day of the week i.e. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday etc..

Day

See the data segmented by individual day. For instance, if you had selected December 2015 as your date range then you would see the data for each day of December segmented out i.e. Dec 1, Dec 2, Dec 3, Dec 4, etc.

Week

See the data segmented by weeks in your date range i.e. Week of Mon, Nov 30 2015 – Week of Mon, Dec 7, etc.

Month

See the data segmented by month. Particularly useful if you are looking at a longer date range. i.e. Looking at a year’s data, you can see how metrics vary from month to month.

Quarter

See the data segmented by yearly quarter. Again, this is only particularly useful when looking at longer date ranges.

Year

See the data segmented by year. Only useful for looking at long term historical performance.

Hour of Day

See the data segmented by hour of the day. This will be the most useful section to look at when making time scheduling optimisations. Remember that current time scheduling settings will affect the data here.


Destination URL

This view gives you metrics segmented by the different destination URLs on your ads—particularly useful if you want an overview of how one page (or pages) is performing compared to another.

Note that the ‘Destination URL’ is now being retired in favour of upgraded URLs.

All advertisers should now be using final URLs.

Final URL

See the data segmented by all the final URLs you are using.


Top Movers

The Top Movers report shows which campaigns and ad groups have had the biggest changes in terms of cost and clicks. You can sort this by either amount or percentage, and you will have to choose two date ranges: The time period you want the data for and a time period to compare it to.


Geographic

The Geographic section allows you to quickly see which countries, regions or even cities are involved in your campaign. Sort your data by cost per conversion or total conversions to help you see which areas are more profitable for you. From there, you can then decide whether you want to segregate specific areas and assign them a separate budget or whether you need to think about making the campaign itself more relevant to that particular area.

User Locations

Much like geographic, User locations gives you information about a user’s specific location i.e. where they were when they completed their search. If a user searched for “Manchester Driving Lessons” then in the “geographic” view, their data would be attributed to Manchester. However, say they completed this search in London; therefore, so the data for this click will be attributed to London in the User Location view.

Why can’t I see my ad in the first place?

Distance

This view is only available to you if you have location extensions enabled for your campaigns. If so, it records the data for how close to your registered locations the click occurred. This is good for deciding where may be a good place to open a new branch. For instance, if you can see that a lot of clicks come from an area that is far away from any of your locations, some lane in that region might be good for a new store.


Search Terms

This view is very much like reviewing your search query report. It shows you the actual search terms that are triggering your ads. Reviewing this data will help you to expand your current keyword lists to include longer tail, high conversion intent keywords. Similarly, it will allow you to see any irrelevant terms that are triggering your ads so you can then optimise your negative keyword strategy to ensure you are wasting as little spend as possible.

Paid & Organic

This report requires you have a search console account for your site and have it linked to AdWords via Webmaster Tools. Once this is done, you will be able to see how your site’s organic listings are showing in context with how your paid AdWords keywords are shown for the same search queries (for text ads only). This can help you understand how your paid and organic efforts support one another. Alternatively, it can help with expanding your current AdWords keyword lists by way of showing search terms where your paid ads do not currently show but you may have an excellent organic performance.

Automatic Placements

This report requires you to be running Display campaigns on the Google Display Network. Here you will see exactly where your ads are being shown in your campaigns, that employ contextual targeting based on keyword, demographic, user interest group etc. It’s analogous to the Search Term report but for your display campaigns. You can see where the placements are (and whether they are driving conversions or not), and then can use this information to remove a particular placement that’s irrelevant, or to add it to your managed placement campaigns should a specific placement be profitable for the business..

Free Clicks

Some ads that you serve on the GDN may not require a click to be interacted with. For instance, your ad may play a video or expand into a larger image when hovered over. As users don’t click the ad to interact with it in this way, their interaction data will not be recorded as a click. This is where the free clicks report comes into play. Google will still record a user hovering over the ad to play the video but will report this as a free click here in the dimensions tab. Using this data you will be able to see how your different ad formats are driving user engagement and are catching users’ attention. Use this data to refine your ads, whether it’s testing two different ad formats or simply two different versions of the same format.


Call Details

This view requires active call extensions to be applied to your campaigns using the Google Call Forwarding service. Here, you will see data on the below metrics:

  • Call Start time
  • Call End Time
  • Status (received, missed etc.)
  • Call Duration (Seconds)
  • Caller Area Code
  • Phone Cost
  • Call Type (manually dialled or mobile click to call)
  • Call Source

This information can be useful for you see which areas or locations prefer to interact with your company via telephone or not.


Campaign Details

This view gives you all of the usual metrics for campaigns i.e. clicks, impressions, CTR etc. It also gives you data regarding the use of ad extensions and whether those extensions are active or disapproved. On top of this, you also get data regarding the campaign type, subtype, bid strategy, network and bid strategy type. It can be really useful for you to do a quick topline check to ensure that settings of the campaigns are correct, and ad extensions are approved and working correctly—without having to delve into each section of the interface for each campaign.

Ad Group Details

This view is very much the same as the Campaign Details view, but looks at the ad group level of the data. This is useful to ensure that the settings, ad group level extensions and ad groups themselves are running and serving ads correctly.