When looking at the stats for one ad-group within a campaign, isn’t it likely that you’ll next want to see the stats from the following ad-group in the campaign? Or the previous one? Or dive down to the keyword level? And then move to the keywords for the next ad-group. Or move up from ad-group to see those same stats at the Campaign level?

While looking at just about any paid search analytics report it should be easy to move up, down, left, or right.

It isn’t.

Adwords

In the Google Adwords interface, you can go down in a pretty natural manner – by clicking on a campaign or ad-group name. To go up requires a click in the breadcrumb nav bar. There is no next or previous, you have to go up then back down.

This might sound trivial. Until you do it for an hour or two. Or 15 times a day. It’s a massive time waste and more importantly ultimately prevents analysis. At some point it’s just not worth it to look over those last few ad-groups, or check that new theory on the two campaigns you’ve already seen.

Adwords Editor

In Google’s fantastic Adword Editor, the problem is largely solved by the 3-pane design. No matter what you’re looking at you can switch very quickly to another campaign or ad-group. And the tabs across the top make it simple and quick to go from keywords to negatives to text-ads.

AE isn’t primarily an analytics package, so it doesn’t really solve this problem, but it’s a great example of how elegance and speed make you both want to use a tool and use it a lot more. You can jump into AE, look at things, make some changes, and even take the extra step of having to submit them (since you’re working off-line) and it feels efficient.

Omniture SiteCatalyst / SearchCenter

In Omniture SiteCatalyst the problem is exacerbated because there can be a lot more data (especially if you use a lot of calculated metrics as we do), the interface is way heavier, and let’s face it – SiteCatalyst is generally to painfully slow.

In version 13.5 SiteCatalyst added a very handy drill-down feature to SearchCenter data that makes it pretty simple and sometimes even quick to drill from engine to campaign to ad-group to keyword.

Unfortunately, moving back up the hierarchy is neither elegant nor fast, and there remains no way to go sideways other than going all the way back up (which basically means starting over).

In some cases the ‘Select Ad Group’ or ‘Select Campaign’ dialog box does allow a semi-direct way to switch from one to another, but the cost is three terribly slow transitions. (One for the dialog itself to appear, another to execute a narrowing search, and a final one to draw the resulting report – I just did one and it took a full minute to complete these three steps just to shift from one campaign to another).

Conclusion

I spent nearly all of today navigating the reports described above. With a nice little 4-way navigation button, or if the 3-pane design were moved into Adwords and adopted by Omniture, I’m pretty sure I could have been done by lunch.