When they upgraded to the new version earlier this summer, I was astonished to find that they had removed a lot of the most valuable reports that I used to monitor my account's performance.
I know a lot of people adjust their accounts at the campaign and ad group level, and I'm sure that works for them. I, however, like to look at keywords. I use exclusively Exact match, and I want to know which SERPs are driving sales and which are losers. Then I can develop an algorithm to set the keyword's bid based on the ROI. This approach seems to work well for me. Since I've begun using it, I've cut my costs to a third of what it used to be while watching revenue go up.
In the old version of Analytics, I could bypass the whole campaign/ad group structure and download an entire list of keywords with cost and revenue data. It made my life very easy.
With the new version, keywords can only be downloaded 500 at a time. When I emailed support for answers, they told me to utilize the campaign report and drill down through the hierarchy of ad groups to view keyword performance. Not very practical when there's over 500 ad groups. After about a half-dozen emails, they finally sent me a manual URL edit that would allow me to download larger keyword reports.
But even with this, they've seperated cost and revenue into two reports. I have to pull them both into Access and merge them to get anything useful. What used to be five minutes to do is now an hour, and it wouldn't even be possible if I hadn't complained until they shared a hack (which they claimed didn't exist through 5 email responses). I'm loathe to say it, but I think this is an intentional change to remove advertisers' ability to make good investment decisions. If it is, that just plain old corporate greed and it sickens me.
Ahhhh, a good rant sure does make one feel better. AdWords Guy, if your reading please take this feedback to the team. I sent it to the rep. that helped me but he completely blew it off.
AWA
