How to set up Google Looker Studio reports for ad performance measurement

Tracking ad performance is essential to improving website monetization. Google Looker Studio allows you to build customized reports that meet your needs. These reports let you quickly check your website’s key performance indicators (KPIs) while creating individual campaign reports to share with relevant team members.

This tutorial will walk you through setting up reports to monitor ad performance in Google Looker Studio. It assumes you already have some experience with Looker Studio and aims to help you enhance existing reports with Advanced Ads data for richer insights.

Requirements to connect Advanced Ads and Google Looker Studio

To follow the steps in this tutorial, you’ll need a free Looker Studio account and access to your Google Analytics property. Additionally, activate the Advanced Ads Tracking add-on on your website and connect it with Google Analytics.

• Tracking add-on
• Tracking ad impressions and clicks with Google Analytics

You must set up a report in your Looker Studio account. If you’re already using Looker Studio to analyze your website, you can edit this report and add the ad information you need.

If you haven’t created a Looker Studio report yet, create a new one now. I recommend importing a Google Analytics template to simplify the first steps, as these templates already contain much of your website performance data and serve as a good starting point for customization..

Relevant dimensions and metrics for analyzing ad performance in Google Looker Studio

When analyzing ads, the two main metrics, impressions and clicks, are most interesting. The specific information you’ll need and how you want to display it depends on your requirements and ad setup. For this reason, a general ad evaluation template is often not very useful. Instead, you should take advantage of Google Looker Studio’s flexibility in creating custom reports.

But first, let’s look at the dimensions and metrics that contain ad-related key figures and statistics. Once you understand this, you can automatically filter your ad data and group it with other data from Google Analytics.

Dimensions and metrics

In Google Looker Studio, you can add elements from a wide selection to report pages and customize them afterward. Start by creating a dedicated page within your report to analyze ad performance. From here, you’ll access all metrics and dimensions linked from Google Analytics. 

For ad performance tracking, Advanced Ads is the most important dimension—it displays each ad’s name alongside its performance data. To add this dimension to your report, locate it under the linked data source, then drag it from the right-side menu and drop it into the desired spot on the left side of your report page. You can apply the same drag-and-drop method to add dimensions like Page Title and Screen Class if relevant.

Further customization of your Looker Studio report

Once you’ve added an element to your report, click on it to unlock more customization options. On the right side of the screen, navigate to the Property view within the menu. Here, you can adjust the metrics to be displayed. For evaluating the Advanced Ads dimension, the primary metric to add is Event Count—this shows how often events associated with each ad are triggered, providing essential insights into performance. 

You can also use this panel to customize your report’s visuals further, such as setting up automatic comparisons with previous periods or selecting a specific chart type to make the data easier to analyze.

When you add “Event Count” to your Advanced Ads reports, note that events for impressions and clicks are aggregated for each ad by default. Since this aggregated value provides little insight, separating clicks from impressions is essential. You can achieve this by adding a filter to the report element, allowing you to display either the number of impressions or clicks separately—making for a more precise analysis. I’ll go over the necessary steps below.

Set up the report item to analyze Advanced Ads events twice, filtering once for impressions and once for clicks.

Advanced Ads	Shows the name of the ad unit
Event Count	Show the total number of a specific event
Event Name	Advanced_ads_impression and advanced_ads_click

Filter

To add a filter to an existing element, select the element and ensure that dimensions and metrics have already been set. Scroll down to the “Filter” section, then click the + icon to add a new filter. After clicking, you can choose from a list of existing filters or create a new one.

To prevent impressions and clicks from being aggregated, use this filter to select one of the two event types. By default, all Advanced Ads events are titled advanced_ads_impression and advanced_ads_click.

Reports and data for analyzing ad performance

You can integrate Google Analytics data from Advanced Ads into various reports and tailor them precisely to your needs for analyzing your website’s performance. In this section, I will show you three examples to analyze the number of clicks, impressions, and the pages where ads were clicked.

With the help of filters, you can go even further and create reports for different use cases, such as measuring ad performance for:

• Specific ad campaigns
• Different traffic sources like organic search, social media, or newsletters
• Specific geographic locations
• Device types like mobile, tablet, or desktop

Total ad clicks

This data view, which shows the respective clicks per ad over a defined period, is probably the most important for most publishers.

To include an overview of the number of ad clicks sorted by ads in your report, follow these steps:

1. Add a new element and the dimension Advanced Ads.
2. Add the metric event count.
3. Add a filter and define a rule to include only the events for ad clicks.

A filter rule to display only the number of clicks, excluding impressions for ads, would look like this:

Total ad impressions

To include an overview of the number of ad impressions sorted by ads in your report, follow these steps:

1. Add a new element and the dimension Advanced Ads.
2. Add the metric event count.
3. Add a filter and define a rule to include only the events for ad impressions.

A filter rule to display only the number of impressions, excluding clicks for ads, would look like this::

Pages with ad clicks

In my quick analysis of my web pages, I find it interesting to know on which specific pages of my content ads are clicked. This helps me learn what type of content I can monetize particularly well.

 To create such a report, follow these steps:

1. Add a new element and the dimension Page title and screen class
2. Add the metrics “Advanced Ads” and “event count”
3. Add a filter and define a rule to include only the events for ad clicks

Conclusion on ad performance tracking with Google Looker Studio reports

Google Looker Studio allows you to create customized reports to monitor a website’s status at a glance and view key metrics. Integrating data recorded by Advanced Ads and Google Analytics into Looker Studio extends this overview to include ad performance-specific data, making the performance of your ad campaigns clear and accessible.

While setting up the reports may be tricky at first, once established, Google Looker Studio becomes a handy monitoring tool that is more straightforward than Google Analytics.