Google Adwords has become a very important advertising medium for all advertisers & marketing professionals. As one using Google Adwords, you should be analyzing your various campaigns, adgroups, ads etc constantly. But the readymade reports provided by Google Adwords are pretty rudimentary and have the below disadvantages.

• There aren't actually many report options. The report consists of rows of data which you can see as HTML or export as a csv/xls files.
• The only chart option given plots only one metric (CPM, Clicks, CTR etc) at a time.
• The chart and the data are separate and this means you can't drill down a chart to see the underlying data.
• The reports don't allow you to compare how two different campaigns are performing. Or how a campaign in July 2009 (current month) performed as against June 2009 (previous month) or July 2008 (same month, previous year).
• The charts cannot be saved for referencing anytime later.
• The charts cannot be shared or collaborated upon online.

With Zoho Reports, you can do a lot of analysis with the data provided by Google Adwords. Multiple metrics can be plotted and studied. Comparisons between campaigns can be done and a campaign can be compared to how it had performed across different time lines (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or even yearly). Based on such analysis, you can take actions to reduce costs and get higher returns for the money you spend on Google Adwords.

Let's see in this post how Zoho Reports can help you analyze various campaigns & allow you to get the maximum bang for your buck (lower costs, more conversions etc). Embedded below are charts with real data from a Google Adwords account that we have set up. The campaigns have been renamed generically as for mountain bikes. There are 3 campaigns being run, one in the US, one in Europe and one comprising of other countries in Australasia and Africa since Jan 2007.

The above chart shows the avg cost / conversion trends across the various campaigns.

This chart shows how the CTR has varied over the months for the three campaigns. The above two examples compare how various campaigns are performing with respect to each other. We can also compare how a campaign's various metrics have performed over time.

The above chart plots the impressions vs clicks for the Europe campaign over the past year. If pretty charts aren't your cup of tea, you can make pivot tables. Like this one for example, which plots the quarterly conversions for the campaigns.

The embedded reports above are just a few samples. The original database with a slew of reports for the three example campaigns are available here - http://reports.zoho.com/ZDBDataSheetView.cc?DBID=4000000163350. You can play around the data, create as many reports as you want and see for yourselves how flexible and powerful your Adwords Campaign data becomes, when using the right business intelligence tool.

Most importantly, all these set of campaign-level reports are readily available for your Google Adword analysis. All you have to do is to follow the easy steps as mentioned in this page and you can have the same reports as above for your Google Adwords campaigns as well. We are planning to make this easier further by providing a direct Zoho Reports connector to your Google Adwords account soon.

Next, we'll see with examples how to analyze your Google Adwords campaigns at the Adgroups level.

So much of your business data from many of your applications lie in a database like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL or MS Access, behind a firewall. Getting meaningful reports out of such databases and taking corrective actions based on those reports is what business intelligence is all about. The databases themselves are typically costly and creating reports out of them isn't that easy. Buying additional reporting tools, which you need to install and maintain, adds up to your costs. But by making your data available in Zoho Reports, you get these major benefits :

1. Create meaningful reports easily using just drag-and-drop
2. The reports you create are accessible from anywhere
3. Enable collaborative analysis and reporting
   
4. Share the reports over the web to whoever you want
5. Very affordable, pay-as-you-go monthly pricing plans (Zoho Reports is actually free, as of now)
   

Zoho Reports makes it easy to push data from behind-the-firewall databases (and CSV files too) by providing you with an Upload Tool (a database connector). Using the tool, you can easily connect and push data from your databases like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and MS Access  to Zoho Reports. You can schedule data uploads in regular intervals so that you continue to get near-real-time reports based on your dynamic data.

As the diagram above shows, the tool works in a simple way. It is a database connector that pulls data from your databases and uploads it to Zoho Reports. Data gets transfered securely over the Internet to Zoho Reports using a secured connection (HTTPS).  You can then create powerful reports  and analysis based on the data uploaded. Read more about how to move data from your in-house databases to Zoho Reports.

If you are interested in using Zoho Reports for your business intelligence and reporting needs, do contact us for a personalized demo.

The latest Zoho Reports update brings in the 'Query over Query' functionality, which has been one of the top request from our users. You can now have SELECT queries that combine already existing Query Tables. Let's see an example of how this comes in handy. Say you have a Sales table with sales figures for various customers, products, regions etc across years.



Say you would like to know who your Top 10 customers with respect to sales value were in 2006. Your query table would look like,



The above Query Table in 'View Mode' with the top 10 customers arranged in alphabetical order.



And now you want to know how much you sold to those top customers of 2006 in 2008. This is where the new functionality will come in handy. You will arrive with the required data by joining the base Sales table with the above top 10 customers of 2006 Query Table. The new Query Table will look like,



The above Query Table in 'View Mode' with the customer names in alphabetical order.



You can save the resultant query table and create the necessary reports over it.

With this new "Query over Query" feature, you can create very powerful reporting queries on your data and use it for your report generation and analytics. It also helps in organizing your queries into reusable functional units. To know more about how to create a Query Table, checkout this video.

Other Enhancements
Previously, direct import was restricted to CSV files. And you had to do a copy-paste from Microft Excel (XLS) files. From now on, you can directly import XLS files too.



Also, for xls, html files larger than 3 MB, you can now zip them and import into Zoho Reports.

Try these new features in Zoho Reports and let us know your feedback comments.

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