Google Ads Custom Columns

Key Takeaways

ppc advertising is a very data-heavy marketing tactic and for evidence of that you need only look at the different interfaces that we're able to use and all the metrics that they show us google ads is no exception to that rule when you open up the column selector there are tons of different metrics and data points available for you to utilize and see the different metrics and performance of your campaigns but every once in a while you actually might need to go beyond the preset metrics in there those columns are put together for the vast majority of advertisers but depending on your business and your marketing objectives we might need to customize the view a little bit more and go beyond the columns that are available in the preset list that's where google ads custom columns come in today we're going to talk about what they are how you can use them to create a different view of the data that's already in the platform plus how you can use them to create completely new metrics that aren't available in the platform to make sure that you're seeing the data that's most important to you and your business once we hop into the google ads interface the custom column creator is pretty easy to find and i bet you can guess where it is just head over to columns and select modify columns and this will open up the regular column selector that you can choose for your campaigns there are tons of preset options in here and these aren't even the actual columns you can choose you can open up the drop down and see all of these different metrics available so there's tons of options that you can choose from so definitely look through those but to create your custom column we're going to scroll down here to the bottom and open up this last one that says custom columns aptly named right now you can see we don't have any custom columns so we're going to go ahead and click this button to create a custom column when you do that you're going to open up this builder for your custom column so let's run through this pretty quick you're first going to set a name that you have 40 characters for and that's going to populate just in the same way all the regular column headers do clicks conversions whatever it is whatever you want to name this column and have it show up in the interface add that here the description down below is going to have the same functionality as what i'm about to do and that's when you hover over the column name in the interface the descriptor text is going to pop up to help remind you or share with somebody else in the account what the metric is so if you need to add an additional description you can do that here then we get into the actual building of the metrics so we'll run through this in just a second but this is effectively where we're going to build the data that populates in this custom column and the last piece is that you can pick the format that you want your data to take whether it's a number a percentage or some form of currency depending on what metric you're trying to set up so the first thing to know is that with custom columns not all of the same metrics are available that were available in the previous view when we open this up we can see that there are four options here two of these likely aren't going to be useful for you the first is competitive metrics the only one available there is average position and since this is a deprecated metric it's really not that useful the second is a brand lift study this account had a brand lift study run at some point so it has the metrics available for that but if you've not run an official brand lift study through google ads these metrics will not be available for you if you have then there's a lot of metrics you can choose from here for most of you the main metrics we're going to focus on are performance and conversions so looking at performance we can do everything from clicks impressions cost and valid clicks all those different metrics are available for a custom column and then for conversions you have a lot of control here so whether it's conversions all conversions and then a lot of different metrics around the rates values it's even got things down here around across device conversion and view through conversion as well so lots of different options available there the last piece i want to show you before we set up any sort of example is that you can set up some filters around these metrics so let's just say we want to pick clicks when we do that clicks has populated in this formula builder so we can then edit around it but you'll also notice that this segment piece came up over here and it has clicks next to the name you can segment or filter the click data that you have populated in this column based on the conversion action or conversion source whatever's in here you can also segment by different devices you can segment by the network whether it's google search search partners or the display network and you can filter it for the placement that the ad showed up whether it was in the top other google display network and whether it was search partners top or other let's just say for example that we wanted to filter only for mobile clicks if we check the box next to it you can see that the value changed over here so that now it says clicks and then it has mobile phones next to it for some reason if it's really useful for you to always see the number of clicks next to the number of clicks that came from a mobile phone or if you're constantly segmenting by device this can be a really easy way for you to set up a column to see those metrics instead i'm going to go ahead and clear this out and we're going to run through two examples the first type of custom column i use is really similar to the one we just did and it really only has one metric available i don't end up using any of the functionality down here to create a formula i really just want to see a new number next to the existing number that i have the best case scenario for that for me is conversion actions so i always have my conversions column only include the metrics that i'm trying to optimize for actively so i can either use bid strategies or it's easy to optimize manually for the specific conversion actions that i want but i also track any additional important actions in the all conversions column and sometimes i really don't want to have to segment by conversion action because that can be a bit of a pain it would be nicer if i just had a second column next to my conversions column that showed the actions that i wanted i'm going to set up a custom column that shows the number of demo requests plus the number of sign-ups that i have for this account currently only demo requests are counting my conversions columns but free signups are also important so i'm going to go ahead and create an example of what it would look like to find those combined metrics now i can come down to metric i'm going to filter for just conversions but one thing to note here is that since this free signup action is not in my conversions column i have to choose all conversions to make sure that it's going to be included otherwise it'll be the same thing as when you filter for conversions and it has a zero next to it it won't show up so i need to choose all conversions for this now i can filter for those demo requests and free trials sorry this is blurred out but you don't need to see all these conversion action names so what i've done here is created a metric that's all conversions and then it has the names of the conversion actions next to it that are going to be included in this all conversion metric so let's go ahead and click save and see what this looks like in the interface once you've clicked save you'll notice that the demos plus free trials is showing up here and when i hover over it it has the description that i gave it the other thing you'll notice is that when you hover over it there is a pencil that will open up the same editor that we just had if you will need to make any sort of changes or you can delete it by clicking the trash can but for now let's check out what it looks like now we can see here over on the far right i've got my different columns so i have conversions demos and free trials and all conversions column and you can tell that the conversions column used to have about 2100 conversions but now with my free trials added in i've got about 3 400 and then all conversions is 16 000 because there are a lot of other conversion actions that are being included in here so what this does is it allows me to see okay i want to make sure that i'm optimizing for this conversion metric but i do want to keep this additional free trial number in the back of my mind as well because these are also important conversion actions so if i had to make a choice let's say about which campaign to give budget to i might focus primarily on this conversions number but if they're relatively similar in performance i can then use this demo plus free trial number to kind of push myself over the edge to decide which campaign really deserves the budget if it also has more free trials coming through in the same way that you use all the other metrics in the interface you can also then still segment if you want to so let's say we segment by device and now we can see the performance for this demo plus free trial by device by campaign so these metrics that you create are going to be just as usable with all the other functionality as you would for any other metric in the interface you can also filter if you want to and if you scroll down you'll be able to see that you can filter by the custom columns you have in place so it's got my demos plus free trials and now i can say that i only want to filter for a campaign that has more than one of these different demo plus free trial actions and now it's filtered my campaign to only include the ones that i want in there there's lots of functionality with these custom metrics just know you're not limited because you're using a custom metric so now i want to set up the second type of custom column i use and that's one that actually has a formula so let's hop back into our column builder i'm going to pop down here and click create custom column building a custom column with formulas isn't that difficult the entire process is pretty much the same as the one we just did the biggest thing you need to know are the order of operations for algebra just to know what order to use these in and making sure that you're getting the metric that you want but for right now i'm going to do a pretty basic one and that's one that i use for ad copy testing we typically look at click-through rate conversion rate cost per conversion to determine which of our ad variants is winning but a metric that i also like to use is impressions to conversion how many impressions does it take for me to generate one net conversion on average for that ad unit so i'm going to go ahead and set that up the way that i normally would i'll then choose from the metric drop down that i want to have conversions and then i choose my function which is going to be divided by and then i choose impressions and this should be very reminiscent of seeing any sort of click-through rate which is clicks divided by impressions but since i'm doing impression to conversion it's going to be conversions divided by impression if i wanted to make any sort of segment changes i could filter over here i don't want to do that for right now the last thing i want to do is change my data format to be a percentage and now that i have that set up i'm all ready to go so i'm going to click save and head back into the manager and now we can see this impression to conversion number is populated over here on the right but like i said this is mostly used in my instance for ad copy testing so let's hop into an example so looking at this ad copy test we've got a two-way test running and click-through rate is relatively identical conversion rate is a bit different which is leading to a different cost per conversion this one is a relatively clear example of a winner but if we wanted to add in our columns we can head over to the column editor modify columns and then choose from our drop down and you'll see all of the custom columns you've created available at every level demo plus free trial is available plus impression to conversion and again although i already said that this one is a pretty clear definition of a winner now we can see the impression to conversion stats alongside the ad copy and all the additional metrics if we were at a stalemate or if they ended up having the same cost per conversion something along those lines we could use impression to conversion to help make that decision and just like with the campaigns tab you have all the same functionality so if you wanted to segment and see which ad variant was the winner by device let's say you could also do that again just so happens that this ad variant performs better impressioning conversion for all the devices but if it didn't then you would have some insights to say okay maybe this variant works better on desktop but this other one works better on mobile something along those lines and can help you really take your ad copy testing to the next level there's a lot you can do with custom columns i highly encourage you to check it out see how you can get data in front of you in a much easier manner so it's more digestible you can make decisions quicker and so you can start to see some different metrics at different levels that maybe you couldn't before thanks for watching our video if you thought it was useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to get notified of when a new one comes out be sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel