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Mark Twain once said, “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.”
Data is definitely not good whiskey, which means more data means more problems.
This probably sounds counterintuitive to what you’ve come to believe. Most PPC marketers treat data as a valued resource. After all, more data means more insights, right?
This is an absolutely true statement.
However, more data creates more stuff to analyze, which means more room for confusion, more noise and more responsibilities as a PPC marketer.
Not all data is created equally, which means not all of it actually matters. If you don’t have the razor-sharp analytical mindset to tell the difference, you may be wasting time and money digging through data haystacks for one needle insight.
The reality is that data is only valuable if you have the analytical skills in marketing to extract relevant insights and understanding!
Analytics skills are quickly becoming one of the most essential requirements for all digital marketers.
Customer analysis, search and social media advertising, marketing automation, data-driven decision-making, personalized product recommendations, omnichannel marketing are just some of the many essential digital marketing facets that require analytical thinking.
This discussion will focus on analytics in marketing. How do data, analytics and insights help improve your strategies and grow a better business? What happens if you don’t have analytical skills as a marketer? Is there another option?
Let’s find out.
Marketing in the past required three skills:
While these are all valuable and still-relevant skills for today’s digital marketers, more is required from this position.
Part of the reason for this change is because marketing is much more robust. “Marketing” is now an umbrella term that includes SEO, social media, email marketing, search/social advertising, content creation, web development, influencer marketing and so much more.
All of these added strategies and channels create more responsibilities and more data. How much data is created increasingly grows over time.
Everything in modern marketing can be linked, tracked and measured. It’s a bit of a gift, but also a curse.
You now have limitless information about your customers and how to improve your marketing. Messages can be targeted with pinpoint precision and experiences can be almost completely personalized to each unique user.
This is the stuff that was only possible in the dreams of old marketers.
But, there’s a catch. The curse side of all this data is that you need to study and analyze it to reap these benefits.
For some, creativity and ingenuity are less impactful than an analytical background and a near-addiction to reading the data and using it to make positive changes.
It is increasingly critical that marketers have the skills to understand their data and the ability to transform raw data into actionable insight.
There are several benefits to having analytical skills in marketing.
Since the dawn of business, one of the principal pillars of marketing has been understanding the customer.
In the past, marketers relied on past experiences, intuition and common sense to create marketing campaigns that they thought would resonate with customers.
Today, data allows you to know what customers want. By studying data from their behaviors and demographics, you can figure out what messages, actions, products and offers will encourage audiences to convert.
The demographic data provides the buyer persona (age, location, interests, income level, etc.), while the behavioral clues tell you their feelings, wants and needs.
If time has taught marketers anything, it’s that change is constant.
As you analyze your data, you’ll be able to detect trends and shifts as they are happening, or even before they occur. This allows you to make data-driven predictions about the market.
You can use these insights to strategize ahead of time and capitalize on opportunities before the competition even realizes they are there.
You’ll always be one step ahead!
There is always an element of creativity in marketing. It’s what allows you to create new, exciting and fresh ways of presenting old ideas.
Data allows you to inject science into the creative side of marketing. You can analyze the data behind your strategies and campaigns and pinpoint what’s working and what isn’t.
It may be something as little as a single word in a marketing message that helps improve your results. Or, which channels are your most profitable in terms of customer responses.
Essentially, analytical skills in marketing allow you to fine-tune any strategy for peak performance!
Data plays a significant role in PPC campaign management and few areas of marketing produce as much data as PPC.
PPC is also one of the most effective forms of digital marketing. You can:
That all sounds pretty awesome, right? Well, without the ability to understand PPC data, it will be hard to reach any of these goals.
Not to mention, there is a direct cost element with PPC marketing. If you don’t have effective strategies, you could be losing your business money.
Data needs to be applied strategically to improve campaigns. It’s about eliminating areas that are wasting ad spend and maximizing the ones that are producing results.
There will always be unknowns in PPC marketing, but data helps you take calculated risks with a higher chance of success.
Again, data is only valuable if you can translate the raw numbers into concrete understanding and insight. Only then can you use it to make more successful PPC campaigns.
This is not an easy feat. There are lots of hoops, hurdles and hazards that you need to navigate through. Plus, your campaigns and website analytics produce mountains of data every day.
You have to have an analytical mindset to know how to select the correct data and when.
Here is a list of steps you can follow to translate your PPC data into actionable insights.
Most of your PPC data will come from Google Ads (or your other chosen ad platform) and your website analytics.
If you haven’t properly enabled analytics and tracking on your web pages, it is an absolute must for successful PPC marketing.
This will allow you to track users after they’ve clicked your ads. Without this tracking, it will be impossible to know when customers convert and what value that conversion has.
You also want to look at data sources outside of Google Ads. Remember, PPC marketing doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It’s part of your combined marketing strategy.
You should collaborate with sales, CRM data, your SEO team, customer support and other teams across your company. You may be able to solve some data issues simply by consulting other departments.
For instance, if conversion rates are falling across your campaigns, it may be a sign of a bigger problem with the website. You may need to enlist the help of your web developer to resolve this problem.
As mentioned, PPC marketing can help you achieve a wide range of crucial marketing goals for your organization.
As you begin diving into these different data sources, you need to think about what goals matter most to your success.
Are you at a point where brand awareness is more important than revenue? This may be the case if you’re a new company.
Does your business only thrive on sales or are there other conversion goals that may take priority?
It’s important to note that you may have multiple campaigns going at once, each with its own goals. This is normal. After all, even a well-established brand benefits from more awareness.
In this case, you need to prioritize your goals and distinguish primary versus secondary objectives. This will help you know what data and insights are most important to your organization.
This distinction can be best described as the vital few versus the useful many, or the Pareto Principle. This states that most of your results come from a small number of vital tasks (or campaigns, keywords, customers, etc.).
Typically, improvements that satisfy your primary objective(s) will fall into this vital few category. The rest — your secondary goals — will be the useful many.
Assessing and prioritizing your goals doesn’t require an analytical mindset, just critical thinking.
With your goals prioritized, you have a heading. This will help you determine what data needs to be collected and analyzed first.
This is easier said than done. This is where analytical skills in marketing begin to play a significant role in the process.
Even if you only look at metrics specific to PPC, you’ve still got a lot to sift through, like clicks, impressions, conversions, impression share, cost-per-click, conversion rate, clickthrough rate, conversion value and quality score — just to name a few.
That’s not including page views, dwell time and other metrics that your website analytics will offer.
You need to know what these metrics are and how they impact your campaigns. You should understand the difference between impression share versus impressions or conversion value versus cost per conversion.
The more challenging part is knowing which metrics will lead to actionable insights that are relevant to your primary goals.
In some cases, there may be more than one metric that fits the job. For instance, if you’re trying to evaluate your PPC strategy’s success based on revenue, do you evaluate based on return on ad spend, total conversion value or ROI?
These are the analytical dilemmas that face marketers.
You need to frame your data with dimensions (some examples are listed below). These are attributes that you can use to segment your data. Do you want to look at all clicks or only clicks for a certain campaign or keyword?
Dimensions include:
If all the metrics listed earlier seemed overwhelming, adding dimensions into the mix raises the complexity ten-fold.
For instance, if you want to compare total clicks across 25 campaigns, it’s fairly easy when there’s only one dimension and one metric.
However, let’s say you want to compare clicks and conversions for the keyword “PPC analytics.” Specifically, you want to look at mobile device users versus desktop users.
Now you have two metrics and multiple dimensions. This creates more possible combinations of data, thereby creating a more complex analytical puzzle.
Your data dimensions will help you answer specific questions related to your data. While complexity adds a challenge, it also makes resulting insights more valuable.
Since complex insights are more difficult to obtain, there’s a good chance your competitors haven’t detected these opportunities.
Now the real analytical work begins. This is the turning point where raw data is transformed into usable insights.
Analysis is essentially the process of digging deeper. You’ll start by answering an initial analysis question, which will then spark follow-up queries.
You may start by trying to figure out why your campaign is generating fewer clicks recently. You begin identifying a handful of keywords with dramatically lower CTRs. This creates several new questions.
Have search volumes for these keywords changed at all? Are you bidding enough? Have ad ranks been changed? Are there new competitors for these PPC keywords?
Each question-answer deepens your understanding of what’s happening.
Marketers with an analytical background are experts at knowing the right questions to ask and in what order. This expertise allows them to dig deeper faster than markets that may be unfamiliar with analytics.
This speed can mean everything!
Remember, your time as a PPC marketer is very valuable. There’s being busy and then there’s being a PPC manager! Following false insights down data rabbit holes can be a substantial waste of resources.
Plus, if you’re unable to reach actionable insights quickly, the information may no longer be valuable.
Part of analyzing your data means visualizing it with charts.
There’s a common misconception that analytical skills in marketing mean being a number-crunching machine. You can take one look at a spreadsheet and know exactly what the wall of numbers is saying.
That’s not the case. The only number-crunching machines that can accurately and efficiently pull insights from spreadsheets are, well, machines.
The good news is that you aren’t confined to only analyzing spreadsheets. Charts can effortlessly translate that mind-numbing wall of numbers into a visual representation that lets you see insights.
These visual reports show you where your campaigns are succeeding and what still needs work.
For the best PPC charts, you need a data visualization tool like ChartExpo.
ChartExpo is one of the only tools that offers a library of visualization options specific to PPC and digital marketing for Microsoft Excel and Google Sheet.
With the ChartExpo data visualization tool, you can:
Sometimes, all it takes is a simple bar or line chart to show you where things are going right or wrong. For all of the times where you need more than a simple chart, there’s ChartExpo.
Data and insights have no meaning if you don’t apply them.
When you finally extract clues to improve your PPC campaigns, you need to put that information to work!
Adjust your campaigns accordingly to put your new information to the test. Then, track how the changes positively (or negatively) affect your performance.
It’s critical to make these changes in a controlled environment as best you can. You’ll be able to judge definitively whether the adjustment made an impact or not.
Even a subtle change to a PPC campaign can cause a ripple effect that affects your entire account. Review your strategies before and after the change, including metrics like ROAS, Quality Score, impression share and cost per conversion.
It’s important to note that data and insights are not always as valuable or actionable as they first appear.
You may even reach an incorrect conclusion in your analysis. When you make changes based on this bad result, it could create a negative shift in performance.
This is why it is so crucial to review every change you make!
Automation has created significant shifts in marketing in the past few years. PPC automation technologies and solutions have been increasing in interest and implementation.
These tools aren’t just a passing trend, but a method of simplifying data and streamlining a PPC manager’s responsibilities.
Automation solutions can shoulder a lot of the complex elements of analytics. This allows marketers to focus more on applying insights and developing marketing creatives, instead of trying to make sense of their raw data.
In many ways, the complex nature of today’s Big Data world demands these types of solutions. There is just too much data for even an experienced analytical mind to handle and PPC charts only get you so far.
Considering how quickly PPC campaigns can change, you need to always be on the lookout. Shifts or unexpected outliers in your data can cause performance to behave unexpectedly.
If you aren’t paying attention, your campaigns may be heading towards risky conditions that will hurt optimization and waste valuable ad spend. You may also miss valuable opportunities.
The best PPC automation tools act as an early alarm system for your campaigns. They automatically detect these risks and opportunities.
This gives you plenty of time to make course corrections in your campaigns that steer away from risks and towards opportunities!
PPC Signal is one of the best automation tools for monitoring your campaigns and detecting changes. When you need that always-on early warning system, this is your answer.
It’s almost like having a 24/7 babysitter for your PPC campaigns year-round. While you’re taking care of more critical marketing tasks, PPC Signal watches your campaigns.
If something abnormal happens, like a keyword’s CPC skyrockets or a campaign starts to lose impression share, PPC Signal alerts you. It could be a negative or a positive change.
You only receive a signal when the change is substantial enough that it requires extra attention. After all, you don’t want to be bothered by every single change to your account, just like you don’t want the babysitter calling every time your child eats a Cheerio.
When a change is subtle or minor, PPC Signal doesn’t ignore it. The system makes a note and continues to monitor it. If it matures into a more significant trend, then PPC Signal packages it as an alert for you to review.
To understand how this tool can help you improve your campaigns through automation, it’s best to see it in action!
Let’s say that you notice your campaigns aren’t quite performing to the level you expected. You open up PPC Signal to take a closer look. Immediately, you see all of the active signals that the system has detected.
You can filter your signals by different dimensions and metrics.
Let’s suppose you want to know how CTR is impacting your campaign performance. You can choose to filter signals that specifically deal with CTR.
You’ll notice that every signal tells you:
Once you select a signal that seems interesting or important, you can elect to explore it further.
This real-time data shows you exactly when this downward CTR trend started and the data’s historical performance.
With this chart, you can see the data over a longer period of time. In this example, you’ll see that even though data is declining recently, it’s far above the historical performance. Performance may just be normalizing back to its regular levels.
If you want to see the data in a table form, this is also possible.
With PPC Signal, data analytics becomes as easy as exploring a signal, seeing what’s happening and deciding whether to take action. PPC Signal even recommends a next-step you can take to resolve each signal!
Marketing is traditionally thought of as a creative industry.
This remains true today, but data has created the need for analytical skills in marketing.
If you want to save money, expand your reach, personalize your ad content, measure your results or achieve any marketing goal, analytics is the answer.
Because of the sheer volume of data involved with PPC marketing, manual analysis just isn’t feasible. Even with a large team, you’d be wasting countless hours doing what PPC Signal does automatically.
The data-rich environment of today’s always-changing digital marketing landscape is extremely difficult to traverse, analytical skills or not.
PPC Signal acts as your roadmap. It plots the best course for your campaigns and allows you to steer your marketing in the most promising directions.
Using PPC Signal only requires attention and a thirst for improving your campaigns — two things that need almost zero analytical thinking.
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