A recently released AdWords feature allows you to label (tag) your keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns. Although it might not sound very useful, it’s actually a very powerful thing as it can assist you to build alternative views of your AdWords account. In fact you can create a different account structure which exists in parallel to your current one and you can look at the data from a completely different perspective. That can then give you insights which are quite hard (or impossible) to get otherwise.
How it works
Each campaign, ad group or keyword in the account can have labels assigned. To assign a label, select the desired elements, click on the Labels button and ‘save’. You can also create labels in advance from the Labels page.
Select campaigns (ad groups, ads, keywords) which you want to assign a label. Then select the labels button, type the desired label name and click save. You can have multiple labels for an item as well. It works just like the tags on flickr.
Example
Let’s say your client is promoting a wide range of accommodation (such as apartments, hotels, motels) all around New Zealand. You have created a campaign for each location so you can view the aggregate data for each location. But what if you want to view the same type of data for each type of accommodation. Go to the Ad Group view, use the ‘filter’ to get a list of each accommodation type (e.g. hotel) and make a label for it.
Then in the Labels section, select the ‘report by ad group’ and you will see your alternative account structure.
Other ideas
You can also label:
- keywords by date you added them into the account
- your most important keywords
- groups of campaigns to create another high level subsets of data
- etc.
As of now (May 2012) labels can be configured in the AdWords web interface only. AdWords editor isn’t supporting them yet.
Further reading
http://adwords.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/slice-and-dice-your-data-using-adwords.html