While Google does offer the most transparency of the major search engines in terms of reporting available in the interface, a recent Inside AdWords post admitted that sometimes the custom reporting remains cumbersome. And the good news is that they’re working on making it more readily available.

In the geographic performance report, for example, data is only available daily. I ran one recently for a national campaign over a period of 30-days – listing data down to the city level by day required 10,000+ rows of data! This requires manually summing up the desired geo-graphic level (city, metro/DMA, or state) over the selected period of time. Aside from that, once you have the actionable data sorted and summarized, you have to toggle back to the Campaigns tab to make changes. (Thankfully, Location3’s paid search marketing managers have the advantage of two computer screens, so that helps a lot in going back and forth!)

Anyway, hooray that Google is addressing this and moving towards integrating more performance data directly into the campaign management view. The former Search Query Report is available through the “See search terms” option in the Keywords tab, and the old Placement Performance Report is now right there in the Networks tab. I’ve been using these since they were launched and they were my two favorite features of new interface.

More recently, viewing segmentation by day of week was added. In the Campaigns tab, go to the Filter and views menu, then Segment by, and then choose the time frame. Day/date, day of week, week, month, quarter and year are available:

More transparency = more advanced optimization opportunities, and who doesn’t love that?!  What advanced report would you like to see made directly available next?