Knowing where your ads appear in Gogle Adwords’ Display Network is a must. No matter how targeted your keywords are, your ads may still appear on non-relevant made-for-adsense sites. The problem is, the placement reports are updated in the Adwords interface after 48 hours then you get a complete list of referring sites or placements. Most of the times, this is a little too late. You might have incurred spend on unqualified clicks already.

So what should you do?

First – Connect your Adwords account to your Google Analytics account.  On the “Tools and Analysis” tab in Adwords, click on “Google Analytics”. Once you’re in Google Analytics interface, select the account you want to connect to Adwords, click on Admin then click on “Data Source”. You will now see the Adwords account to connect to. You need to have administrative access to both accounts in order to do this.

Second – Now that you have connected your Adwords account to Google Analytics, you need to wait for data to come in. Then you go to the Advertising> Adwords> Placements menu to get the placement data. This is almost in real-time.

Third – Customize this report to suit your needs.

In the example, I segmented the report by Campaign then Ad groups so I will be able to see placements on campaign + ad group level.

So there you go. You’re now ready to optimize your display network campaigns by looking at the placement report with “almost” real-time data.