Analyze Data With Excel: How to Use Excel to Develop Data Visualizations for Competitive Analysis?

In the world of technology, data is how machines communicate. It’s a language of numbers and metrics; a simple, yet hauntingly complicated system that gives us non-machines many headaches.

Microsoft Excel helps us break this language barrier and turn raw numbers into ideas, trends and insights.

Excel is also useful when you need to transform your data into charts and other visuals. These are invaluable tools that help you see the story behind the numbers and highlight your best assets and most significant shifts in reports to clients and stakeholders.

When it comes to creating effective charts for your data, seeing is really believing. Very few PPC managers have the time to analyze data with Excel by hand. PPC charts make the insights jump off the screen.

This discussion will look at how Google Ads managers can use Excel to transform their PPC data into helpful charts and stunning visuals. It is the most effective way to detect trends, patterns, outliers and other notable events in your data sets.

An Overview Of Excel

Excel is a software tool developed by Microsoft with the core function of making spreadsheets. However, the application can do much more than just make spreadsheets.

There is a vast selection of tools, settings and other options. No matter how you want to present or organize your data, there are options available to help you.

This selection includes pivot tables, a macro programming language (called Visual Basic for Applications or VBA), powerful calculation capabilities and much more.

As part of the Microsoft Office Suite, Excel is compatible with every major operating system — Windows, macOS, Android, iOS — and some lesser-known ones.

Most users have Excel Basic, the standard application. There are other, more expensive options, which have even greater capabilities.

Over the years, Excel has become the go-to method for organizing and presenting data because of its smooth, practical and flexible interface.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a business today that doesn’t use Excel to some degree, mostly because of how integral data management has become for all types of companies.

The reason that Excel is so popular is because of how many different ways it can be used. Even if you aren’t a master of VBA or know how to set up complex computations in your spreadsheets, you can still get a lot of use from this program.

It is truly a vital, versatile and powerful tool for all types of data.

What Is The Importance Of Data Analysis For Your Business?

When running a business, or even just managing a Google Ads account, it is often difficult to know where to start, where to go and the best way to get there. The Digital Age has produced so many new audiences, channels, strategies and other options that are worth exploring.

Our world has become so data-driven. It is crucial to be able to make sense of your marketing data, no matter what type of business you operate.

Hidden in this data is everything you need to learn how to reach your target audiences, make better products, construct stronger ad messages, increase your marketing ROI and so much more.

The problem is that all of this data is a jumbled mess of numbers coming from all different sources. It’s a massive, tangled ball of string (attached to several other equally-tangled balls of string).

Data analysis unravels this mess and reveals the insights obscured by the chaos.

While every path is valuable, some are more fruitful than others. The importance of data analysis is discovering the most promising course of action.

You identify your best and worst performers and use this information to optimize your strategies and maximize your returns.

How Can Excel Help You In Data Analysis?

Navigating through data can feel like a nightmare. It can be quite tricky to explore and process data when dealing with large chunks of it all at once.

After all, not all data is useful or relevant. To make matters worse, data in its raw form can often cause more confusion than clarity.

Before you can derive any sort of actionable intelligence from your data, it needs to be gathered, filtered, cleaned, visualized, analyzed and reported. All of these steps form the data analysis process.

The data analysis process can be different each time you perform it. Unique obstacles and challenges can arise that make conclusions difficult to obtain. Thus, it is best when you have dynamic solutions to handle all of the unexpected bumps in the road.

Excel’s robust toolset offers an excellent kick-start to the process. Not only is it a convenient way to collect, arrange and organize data, but you can also perform complex computations and visualize the data with some basic charting options.

From your spreadsheet data, you may even be able to glean some basic insights. In other words, you can perform some rudimentary analysis right from your spreadsheets, before charting or digging deeper into the numbers.

How To Carry Out The Data Analysis Process?

To extract the most value from your data, you need to consider how data analysis actually works. Here is an overview of the step-by-step process to analyze data with Excel.

1. Specifying Data Requirements

To perform effective data analysis, you need to set the requirements of the data. This means establishing the structure and categories of the data that will be pertinent to your analysis.

For example, if you analyze your marketing audience, your data requirements may include things like their age, income, location, etc. These requirements will dictate what data needs to be collected.

2. Data Collection

Once you have defined the variables and organized them into categories, you need to collect all of the relevant data related to these areas. Your data needs to be complete and as accurate as possible.

Ultimately, it is up to you to source your data correctly and ensure its relevance, quality and accuracy. The information still needs to be filtered and cleaned.

3. Data Processing

After you collect the raw data, you need to organize it for further analysis. You must structure the data into proper categories. This is the stage when you need to enter the data into a spreadsheet or develop some type of data model to arrange the information logically.

Organizing the data in this fashion makes it possible to filter and clean the data.

4. Data Cleaning

The data you have organized may look nice and neat, but it is likely incomplete and may contain errors or duplicate items. Data cleaning is the process of reviewing your collected data and fixing any errors or inaccuracies you may find.

The cleaning process will depend on the type of data you’ve gathered. For example, if it is financial data, you can simply sum up totals and make sure they match your records. This is a pre-review step that is important for establishing the truth and reliability of your data points.

5. Data Analysis

Once your data passes through all of the phases above, it is ready for analysis.

You can manually perform the analysis process by physically examining each row and column of data and comparing the totals and recognizing patterns and other correlations. If your data set is extensive, this is extremely challenging and can border on the impossible.

That is where data visualization tools come into play. By charting the data, you can visually see the patterns, outliers, trends, etc. It is an extremely quick method for gaining a deeper understanding of your data.

6. Communication

While the analysis of the data may seem like the final step, you still need to be able to share and communicate your findings. You may need to report your data insights to stakeholders, clients, team members or other parties.

Whoever is reading your data needs to be able to reach and understand the same conclusions. Sometimes, the data may be too complex and difficult to explain without the help of charts and other tools to simplify the information and communicate the findings effectively.

How does Excel help Digital Marketers in Data Analysis?

Sales is a numbers game and, thanks to the Internet, marketers have more numbers than ever to deal with. This is why data has become so crucial in the Digital Age. However, it is important to realize that data is not valuable unless you can analyze it and extract insights.

These insights are what make Excel and data so helpful to digital marketers. Digital marketers can use Excel to develop and track different strategies that generate new customers.

Here are all of the ways that Excel and data analysis are helpful to digital marketers.

Budgeting

Before you do anything in your digital marketing, you have to answer the budgeting questions. How much money can you afford to spend on each strategy? Think about your entire budget. How much do you allocate towards paying writers for SEO content assets? How high will you set your budget for PPC and Google Ads?

An Excel spreadsheet can quickly arrange your cost-related data and show where and how your budget is utilized. You can save a lot of time by using Excel to track your costs. By having all of your expenses in one place, it is easier to measure how your money is being spent and whether the returns are worth it.

After all, it’s not just about what you are spending, but also what you are getting in return. A pillar of successful digital marketing is being able to optimize how you spend your budget to achieve the best possible results.

Maintain a Blog Calendar

It is important to your customers that you keep in contact with them regularly. You want to avoid long lapses in content or sudden bursts of posting.

Using an Excel spreadsheet, you can easily build an editorial calendar, which will be extremely useful for scheduling the writing and uploading of web content for your pages. It is easier for most people to stay on track when they have a calendar to work from.

Keeping all of your information in the same space makes it easier for you to keep it connected and stay on track. Many teams use Excel spreadsheets to delegate tasks and decide who will do what, when and where.

Tracking SEO Results

Tracking SEO keywords is vital to successful organic search marketing. There are many keyword research and analysis tools that will help you select better search targets and track their performance.

With an Excel spreadsheet, you can take this data and easily compare different keywords. You can also track costs and measure the ROI of each prospective keyword target.

At the end of the day, there is no better way than Excel to collect, organize, track and save data regarding keywords and costs.

Maintain Social Content

Social media is a mandatory strategy for building and cultivating your audience. Similar to having a blog calendar, you can also use Excel to schedule and organize your Tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram Stories, LinkedIn discussions, etc.

More importantly, you can collect your social media metrics across these various platforms and organize them into a single spreadsheet. This allows you to have full visibility of how each platform performs and contributes to your overall social media marketing strategy.

You can use this data to determine which social media platforms are providing the best results, as well as what types of posts work best on which site. If you also track when each post is published, you can use this spreadsheet to determine the best times and days to publish posts.

Tracking Google Ads

Google provides many ways for you to track how effectively your ads are working for you and how many clicks and conversions the ads are generating. Excel is, once again, helpful in collecting and organizing these various metrics.

A common way that PPC marketers use Excel is to set up a table of costs versus clicks. This simple analysis can provide a baseline of your costs versus returns. From there, you can dig deeper into conversions and the actual revenue created from these clicks.

After all, just because you’ve generated lots of clicks doesn’t necessarily mean that your strategies are profitable. Excel can help you determine what ad messages are actually producing profits in your PPC campaigns.

Generate and Track Leads

You can create a traffic/lead tracker with Excel to monitor how many website visitors took that next step and expressed interest. This could be clicking through to your website, subscribing to a newsletter, etc.

Lead generation is a huge part of sales. Excel can help you organize each lead based on their position in your funnel. By analyzing how much of your traffic is developing into viable leads, you can determine whether you’re wasting money or not on your prospects.

In other words, making spreadsheets can help you assess what is working for your business and what isn’t.

Monthly Market Metrics Reports

Seeing your marketing efforts payoff is one of the most rewarding feelings. With an Excel spreadsheet, you can keep track of all of your investments and returns in one place. This will keep your costs in check and ensure that each strategy you implement helps your business.

Excel can help you perform a “monthly marketing metric report.” This simple spreadsheet will show your key metrics month-to-month. Sometimes, strategies change. What worked last month is not guaranteed to achieve the same returns this month.

Tracking this data monthly will ensure that you are always on top of any significant changes in your marketing data.

How Is ChartExpo For Excel Used For Data Analysis?

Excel has a lot of benefits to business owners and marketers. It is a convenient tool for collecting and organizing data. However, it does have its limitations. One of these deficiencies is in charting. Excel only offers a small handful of charts for marketers to use.

As we’ve covered, being able to display data as a chart is extremely valuable. It can save you hours when it comes to detecting insights and understanding the story behind the raw numbers.

So how do you get the most out of your data with this lack of charting options? With the ChartExpo add-in for Excel, you can gain new functionality from Excel.

ChartExpo adds over 80 different charting options to Excel. Many of these charts are designed specifically for digital marketers and PPC advertisers.

Manually analyzing data requires a lot of surfing through spreadsheets. You may even need to have some coding abilities. ChartExpo for Excel makes it simple to gain insights from even a complex spreadsheet.

To get started with the ChartExpo add-in:

• Open your Excel application.
• Open your spreadsheet and click INSERT from the top toolbar. From the drop-down menu, you will see My Apps.
• Click on My Apps and then click to See All.

• If you’ve already added ChartExpo for Excel, you’ll see it available. Otherwise, you’ll have to visit the Microsoft Office Store and download the free plugin.
• Once you’ve installed ChartExpo, select the add-in and click on the Insert button.

• By clicking insert, you’ll add ChartExpo to your Excel environment.
• You’ll be asked to log in with your Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, you can create one for free.
• It’s worth mentioning that you are only required to log into your Microsoft Account the first time you access ChartExpo. Each time you use the plugin after, you will not have to undergo this step.

• At this stage, you are ready to begin using ChartExpo. You have access to the entire library of charts and visualizations. Click on the start button to continue.

• Click Create Chart to get started.

• Next, you’ll see a list of different chart categories. You can select any group to expand it and see the individual charts available under that category.

Let’s say you are running a Google Ads campaign and you want to analyze your ad impressions by time. You can select the Pay-per-click (PPC) category and then choose the Dayparting Chart.

• Once you create the chart, you’ll see a sample Dayparting chart that looks like this:

• By clicking Explore Sample Data, the data will be automatically added to your spreadsheet.

• You can change the data in this table to reflect your campaigns’ data. After adding your own data, click on the Create Chart From Sheet Data Option

• This will change the Dayparting chart to reflect your own data.

With this PPC chart, you can see what days of the week and hours of the day generate the highest impressions. Dark squares reflect times when impressions are at their highest, while lighter squares are times that perform poorly for impressions.

You can use these insights to:

• Stretch your campaign budget: You can change when and how often your ads appear in order to take advantage of this Dayparting schedule. This can help you stretch your budget to its limits by only showing ads at high-value times.
• Maximize your impressions: Impressions can reflect times when your target audience is most active. By increasing bids at these times, you can improve the likelihood that your ads are shown during peak times.
• Time your strategies: Your Dayparting data can also be used to inform your other strategies. When your ads are seeing lots of activity, it could mean valuable times for your social posts, content updates and other tactics.

Remember, if you face any issues with ChartExpo library in Excel 2013, make sure to install office service pack 1 on Windows.

Wrap Up

Unfortunately, data and numbers are so much more complicated than they ever have been in the past. Excel helps you collect, organize and manage the complexities of your data.

Hands down, it is one of the most important tools for a data analyst and for digital marketer who want to visualize their data in better way.

That said, there are some limitations when using Excel, particularly when it comes to charting options.

This is where ChartExpo becomes exceptionally valuable to marketers and pay-per-click advertisers. By adding over 80 different charts and visualization options, you have a lot more freedom with presenting your data.

When you select the perfect chart to visualize your data, it makes discovering valuable insights and reporting results so much easier.

If you are already analyzing data with Excel, you can improve your efforts with just one click by downloading the ChartExpo add-in.