AdWords Segment Feature

Occasionally, AdWords likes to add in nifty new features to its interface that even the most on-the-ball search marketers never really notice until a few months later, when they suddenly ask themselves (or the entire office at large), “Has this always been here?”

Such is the story of the new Segments feature, which AdWords first implemented in November of 2009 under the Filter tab.

Now, though, it gets a tab of its very own, sandwiched between All but Deleted Keywords and the aforementioned Filter tabs. Just click on that handy dandy little Segments tab, and you can sort all your performance data by network, day, week, month, quarter, year, day of the week, click type, device, and… oh, that’s it?

I think you get the picture.

Needless to say, this is a really cool and versatile new feature, made even cooler by the fact that it saves a lot of time as well. Instead of going through and selecting one day or week or month at a time in the date range in order to view your data, you can view it all at once and, blessedly, compare numbers without having to lay a finger on Excel.

Of course, since the initial discovery and subsequent whoas, we here at Engine Ready have been putting the new Segments tab to use. So far, we’ve mostly been segmenting by week, so that we can get a really good picture of why performance increases or decreases week to week. To do this, select a month (or two or three) as your date range, then segment by week. You end up getting something that looks like this:

Each of the four weeks of data is broken down, so that you can easily take a look at the changes in cost per click, conversion rate, position, and anything else that might be affecting your account’s performance. Which makes it much simpler to answer the question: why?

Which makes it much, much simpler to go for the impossible: true optimization.