You try bidding up, bidding down, optimising your campaign by refreshing the keyphrase list, changing your Creatives and finally resort to pausing any keywords that are generating traffic and cost, but no conversions.

This, you think to yourself, should at least cut your costs and focus your efforts and budget only on keywords that convert. What you expect to happen is that after a week or two, conversions should start to increase and the cost per conversion should go down. However, what actually happens is that your campaign spend drops and conversions remain poor. What’s even worse is that previously successful Ad Groups now also seem to be experiencing a drop in conversions.

Help! What’s going on? What to do?

Enter Google’s new Search Funnel report.

These clever new reports, that Google unveiled last month, show those looking for online marketing solutions, not only which clicks have gone on to directly convert (called Last Click) but also show the series of keyword searches that eventually led to a conversion (Top Paths Report) and the keywords that don’t actually convert themselves but may help other keywords to convert( Assist Conversions Report).

In one of Leadgenerators’ accounts, containing 4 Campaigns, I’ve been looking at the Top Paths report and can see that 2 of the weaker Campaigns are actually feeding conversions directly into the strongest Campaign. For example a customer who initially searched for a Lanzarote keyphrase, after further searches, converted with a Brand keyphrase, but the Brand keyphrase was the one credited with the conversion. Another report I then looked at was the Assist Conversions Report, where I noticed that an Italy keyword (that I have previously paused for not converting) actually helped other keywords produce 7 conversions in the last few months.

When you log in to the Overview of your Adwords campaign, you will only see which keywords “last click” that is responsible for creating a conversion. If, based on this report, you pause high spending / low converting keywords, you could well be effecting a phrases that are indirectly driving sales and therefore you will see a drop in conversions across your whole Account or Campaign.

So next time you want improve your PPC campaign’s ROI, take a good long look at your Search Funnel Reports otherwise you could end up cutting your spend, conversions and ultimately your client list.