Campaign Optimization Process: Your Guide to Data Driven Campaign Optimization

Every company is producing massive volumes of data every second of every day. This trend is heavily influenced by the many new channels created by the Internet. All of these channels create new streams of data that are always running and pouring data into the laps of business owners.

Understanding how to use all of this information and what exactly it can be used for is an exciting, but also challenging prospect.

Big data can be overwhelming, to say the least.

The purpose of this guide is to focus on how data can be used to optimize PPC campaigns on Google Ads. Some of the topics covered in this article include:

• Breaking down the data analysis process
• The different types of data analysis that can be used alongside PPC advertising
• Identifying the right data sources
• How to audit your PPC campaign with data
• The benefits and drawbacks to data analysis
• How to align your data with PPC campaigns
• Telling the story of your data with visualizations

 

What Is Data Analysis And Why Is It Important?

By definition, data analysis is a multi-step process with the end-goals of uncovering useful insights, drawing conclusions and finding compelling evidence to support decision-making. There are many different types of analysis and steps in the process, which we will explain in later sections of this guide.

In terms of PPC campaigns, analyzing data is a necessary strategy. Advertisers have to monitor and analyze their performance metrics to understand the overall health of their campaigns and what adjustments should be made.

These metrics cover the major components of paid ads, but expert PPC advertisers know that other data sources are equally valuable to the success of campaigns.

Sales data, industry benchmarks, customer interactions, it all matters. The more data sources you’re able to pull from, the clearer the picture becomes.

With actionable insight into your customers and competitors, as well as the market as a whole, you can make course corrections for your PPC campaigns.

Types Of PPC Data Analyses

There are five different approaches you can take to performing PPC-related data analysis. The method you choose will be determined by your end-goal.

What do you hope to get out of the analysis?

Once you’ve answered this question, the path to choosing the right approach will become clear.

It’s worth mentioning that you’ll use each approach for different projects. There is no best overall approach. Often, you’ll start with one analysis strategy that creates questions that need a second or third approach to answer.

Let’s break down each approach, and when you should use it.

Statistical Data Analysis Approach

Statistical analysis is a form of business intelligence (BI) that uses numeric data.

PPC creates a lot of statistical data. One look at your campaign dashboards and you’ll see a lot of numbers staring back at you.

These numbers give you the most current figures from your campaigns. But, by looking at more complete sets of these structured metrics, you can begin detecting trends that aren’t visible on the surface.

These patterns in your statistical data can help you detect and even predict trends. Better yet, statistical data helps advertisers understand why these changes are occurring.

The statistical data analysis approach is great if your end goal is to understand and improve the overall performance of campaigns.

Exploratory Data Analysis Approach

This approach is also known as the “drill-down” approach. It is designed to go deeper than say a statistical analysis.

The exploratory approach is much more focused and involves a single data set. It’s an excellent approach for after you’ve detected a possible trend in statistical analysis and want further evidence to support the correlation.

It is also a great strategy if you want to drill into a single metric, which can be very helpful to a PPC advertiser.

By intimately exploring your most important metrics (impression share, CTR, cost-per-click, etc.), you can better understand what factors positively and negatively influence these figures. And, identify where potential problems in your campaigns exist.

In short, an exploratory data analysis answers questions regarding a single set of data or a specific metric.

Associative Data Analysis Approach

Any time you look at the relationship between two or more data sets, this is an associative analysis.

An associative analysis is something that all PPC advertisers and digital marketers use because marketing and advertising metrics are so closely related to one another.

By exploring the relationship of two or more related data sets, it adds context to our understanding. We start to see the big picture behind our data and how each figure impacts the next.

When we can identify these relationships and sequences, it becomes easier to learn about audiences and the tactics that lead to higher ad performance. You can also see where hiccups in your campaigns are occurring.

For example, when we look at a campaign with a below-average conversion rate, there’s several metrics that can be examined to find the cause. First, we may analyze clickthrough-rates. Is the ad not converting because people are not clicking?

Then, we see that the CTR is normal; we know people are clicking. Now we can surmise that the problem occurs after the click. So, we investigate bounce rates and find that people are not moving beyond the landing page.

Moving through this sequence helps us understand what’s going on. That is an associative analysis.

Historical Data Analysis Approach

Similar to statistical analysis, the historical analysis approach uses data to identify trends and patterns. The difference is that a historical data analysis looks at past performances, rather than your current ad statuses.

If you need any explanation for why this type of analysis is essential, you can open your history books to Churchill’s famous address to the House of Commons. “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Every PPC advertiser has made mistakes in the past. It may be something as small as bidding on negative keywords. Or, a much bigger issue.

No matter the case, it is crucial to recognize your past campaign performance and use those positive and negative insights to steer your present and future strategies.

After all, you don’t want to continue investing in bad keywords or irrelevant audiences!

Historical data analysis is a great approach to fact-check other insights. For example, you’ve uncovered a possible relationship between two data sets. To test its accuracy, you can see if that relationship is a new trend, or something you can back with historical evidence.

If it is a new trend, then it is best to observe it carefully, before you know for sure that it is accurate. If you have ample historical data to back up the correlation, then it is much safer to say it is a concrete relationship.

These are the benefits of the historical analysis approach.

Comparative Data Analysis Approach

As the name suggests, comparative data analysis is used when you are comparing two sets of data. Typically, these two sets of data are from two different timeframes.

By conducting a comparative analysis that looks at two points in time, you can see how performance has changed or been affected by the adjustments you’ve made.

In other words, it can give the ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison that is so vital towards judging if you’ve made the right changes in your campaigns.

The comparative data analysis approach also gets brought up when you are studying competitors.

Conducting a comparative analysis between your strategies and your competitors’ is vital. A competitor comparison analysis shows which keywords your opponents are targeting, what sort of ad headlines they are using and what success they are having.

You need to know what you’re up against as this provides insight into how you can counter-strategize.

Qualitative Versus Quantitative Data

While on the topic of data analysis approaches, it is also important that we address qualitative versus quantitative data.

Quantitative data is abundant in PPC. Anything that can be counted or measured by a number is quantitative data — quantities. It’s raw, structured data. Clicks, impressions, conversions, ad spend, CTR, bounce, session durations, these are all quantitative data points.

Qualitative data, on the other hand, is unstructured or semi-structured. It’s not measured by numbers, but rather categorical properties, identifiers or other qualities. We use qualitative data particularly when grouping keywords into ad groups or segmenting audiences.

Qualitative data also appears in areas like ad relevance, landing page experience and expected CTR, where Google assigns a below average, average or above-average rating.

The line blurs when we look at quality score. Google uses a lot of qualitative data to determine your quality score, even though the result is represented as a quantitative number. This is a perfect example of how both types of data work together.

Often, we see qualitative data being used to theorize about possible correlations, trends or conclusions. Then, quantitative information is used to provide structured evidence to back up your qualitative claims.

Understanding the relationship between these two data types is key to any successful PPC analysis.

The Data Analysis Process

We’ll explore how to perform a PPC audit with your data in the final section of this article. For now, let’s look at a basic overview of the five stages of the data analysis process:

1. Planning
2. Gathering / Mining
3. Filtering / Cleaning
4. Analyzing
5. Visualizing / Reporting

Stage 1: Planning

Heading into a data analysis without a good plan is damaging not only to the analysis, but also your ability to interpret and utilize the findings.

Analyzing data for the sake of analyzing data is a waste of resources and won’t yield the accurate, valuable insights that drive better decisions and deeper understanding.

So, our very first step is to have a goal. Typically, our goal is to use data to answer a question. The goal itself may be in the form of a question. For example: “How can we acquire more conversions without increasing ad spend?”

It’s also important to align this goal to your overarching organizational objectives. Setting a goal for the sake of setting a goal is the same as analyzing data just to analyze data.

You want to answer a question that helps further your progress towards achieving that overarching objective.

Stage 2: Gathering / Mining

Once we have a question to guide our analysis, we can begin choosing the relevant data sources.

On the surface, gathering this data seems simple. And, sometimes it is. Other times, however, it is much less so.

The issue at hand is that we want the least amount of data to achieve our analysis goal. Extra data will often make it harder to derive insights and can even lead to inaccuracies and incorrect conclusions.

If we can achieve the desired outcome using two sources of data, then we use two sources of data. Later, when we ask follow-up analysis questions, then we can explore those other sources.

Keeping your data sources at a bare minimum becomes a challenge when we have metrics that are very closely related to one another. This is common in PPC.

For example, impressions versus impression share, revenue versus profits, conversion value versus value per conversion — each pair of terms is very similar to one another. This creates confusion when you’re trying to decide which options are most relevant to your analysis.

Stage 3: Filtering / Cleaning

We’ve collected the right data sources and now we’re almost ready to start the analysis. But, before we can analyze the data, we need to make sure that each unique data source is clean.

Clean data sets are complete and errorless. If an inaccuracy goes unchecked and uncleaned, it can corrupt your entire analysis!

There are several traits that your cleaned data should possess:

• Accuracy: How close to the true value you can get?
• Completeness: Gaps in data sets occur for a number of reasons; it is important to identify incomplete sets and fill in the missing links.
• Validity: In terms of PPC, valid data will often pertain to a time frame or platform.
• Uniformity: If your data has units attached, those units need to be the same across all sources. If you were looking at ad spend in dollars, data sets that show euros need to be converted.

Uniformity ensures that unalike data sources can “talk” to one another, which is necessary for accurate analysis.

This is a big challenge, especially if you are dealing with both unstructured and structured data.

Stage 4: Analyzing

Analyzing data is both an art and a science.

The art is determining the right way(s) to manipulate data to create the intended results. The science part involves identifying, calculating and comprehending the various trends, correlations, outliers and other relationships.

Most data scientists will start with a pivot table. This allows you to filter your data based on mean, max, min, standard deviation and other variables. Alternatively, you can plot the data in a chart and find correlations that way.

It’s possible that the data you’ve gathered isn’t the right data, or that your initial question changes slightly. In these scenarios, you may have to go back to steps two and three and introduce additional, new sources of data.

In a way, there’s no wrong way to manipulate your data. Any fresh angle or lens you can look at the information through can yield previously undiscovered results.

There is, however, a right way to manipulate your data that will ultimately provide the answers you’re looking for.

Stage 5: Reporting / Visualizing

With your analysis completed, the task shifts to reporting and visualizing your findings. This is the stage where we interpret the results and find ways to showcase those findings to ourselves and others.

The extent of our need to report and visualize is highly dependent on the scope of the analysis.

For example, if we’re conducting a basic analysis for ourselves, a simple report suffices. This report could be a brief summary of the findings and whether or not your original question or hypothesis has been answered or confirmed.

When you need to showcase your findings to other people, however, a more detailed report is required. This report will not only detail the findings, but also break down the entire analysis process, highlight potential limitations of the results and any follow-up research that still needs to be conducted.

Often, data reports will include tables, graphics and graphs that help visually represent the results and tell the story of the process that went into reaching the achieved results.

This is known as data visualization.

Visualization is particularly important when showing analysis results to stakeholders that may not have a mind for analytics. Visually representing the data may be your only hope for them to understand the insights you’re conveying.

Sometimes, visualizing data in different ways can also reveal to you, the data scientist, insights that you couldn’t see in your raw spreadsheets.

The Benefits Of Optimizing PPC Campaigns With Data

Data analysis is unmistakably complex. As your head is swimming inside a fishbowl of numbers, metrics and other kernels of data, you may start wondering, what in the world am I doing all this for?

Well, because you want your PPC campaigns to improve, right? Data illuminates the path between where your PPC efforts are, and where you want them to be.

Identify Positive And Negative Changes In Keywords

Improving your PPC campaigns and brightening this aforementioned pathway requires a deep understanding of where your wins and losses occur.

At the heart of these wins and loses is optimizing keyword bids by performance. Specifically, which keywords are paying off and deserve more attention, and which you need to toss on your negative keyword list.

This is not an easy task because even a small PPC campaign can consist of hundreds of individual keywords. And, each one is influenced by a number of different factors, like user behaviors, competitor strategies and changes to the platform.

Individually studying each keyword requires a lot of tiresome work, without much result. You want to work smarter, not harder, and that’s the edge that data analysis provides.

By analyzing your keywords for trends and changes, you can better identify terms that are acting abnormal and make the necessary adjustments quickly.

Data analysis also lifts the veil on understanding why these changes are occurring. Is it just a one-off anomaly? Or, does this outlying change reflect a more significant trend that you can take advantage of?

Optimize Ad Spend

When we talk about PPC keyword wins and loses, we’re not just talking about performance. We’re also talking money.

You want to make the most of your ad budget, especially if you’re a smaller business that doesn’t have the deep wallet of your competitors.

This is a secondary benefit of optimizing keywords. When you protect yourself against negative or underperforming terms, while doubling efforts on the words that net the most return, you’re allocating your budget more appropriately.

Thus, you’ll see better returns on your ad budget that will help you grow your business.

Leverage User Intent

As you optimize your keywords, you’ll detect search queries that have user intent behind them. For example, “buy a new bike” suggests that the user is intending to buy a bicycle. If a potential customer searches for “best bikes,” we don’t have that same buying intent.

User intent is a very important part of PPC marketing because it allows us to target customers that are at the end of the funnel and ready to convert. Generating highly qualified leads is a key advantage to PPC.

By exploring your data for the terms that lead to conversion most often, you can begin to see what level of user intent existed for those searches. Is their intent aligned with what your ads offer? If not, it may be a sign that you need to highlight different offers, products or benefits in your ads.

Segment Audiences More Effectively

Next on a PPC advertiser’s priority list is audience segmentation. The better we can group our different audiences, the easier it becomes to understand their behaviors and how to approach them with effective PPC content.

Relevance is key in successful PPC. If your ads aren’t relevant, or valuable, your ad impressions don’t click or convert. When we have broad audiences, it is hard to develop ad content that is relevant to everyone.

With deeper audience targeting, on the other hand, you’re able to serve the direct needs of each small audience cluster.

Effective segmentation requires you to identify your audiences and analyze the tactics that work best. It’s one part market research and one part of data science.

There’s a lot of different ways you can segment audiences, such as by demographics, locations, behaviors, etc. These are unstructured and structured data points that you can use to conduct analysis projects.

Once you have your audience categories determined, you can use data analysis again to measure the success of your strategies within each segment. This breeds a more profound understanding of how each group behaves and where their interests and attitudes lie.

Measure The Competition

Pay per click advertising is competitive. You’re always going to have other advertisers vying for the same top ad ranks and placements that you want.

Analyzing your competition has many benefits. First, it allows you to measure your place in the marketplace. Are you a big fish in a small pond, or the opposite?

Next, it gives you insights into how your competitors are navigating the same PPC landscape. In other words, what keywords they are targeting, what sort of landing pages they are bringing to the table, how they structure their ads, what CTAs they prefer, etc.

Answering these questions creates a much clearer image of how you match up with your PPC competition. As mentioned, you can use the insights to effectively counter-strategize.

A successful competitor analysis can reveal opportunities or gaps in the competition where you can earn an advantage. This is a key benefit, especially when working against intense competition.

Obstacles When Optimizing PPC Campaigns With Data

There are no inherent disadvantages to optimizing campaigns with data. It’s a necessary step if you want to succeed in the PPC marketplace.

There are, however, some obstacles that you need to be aware of.

• Time: Conducting a PPC analysis requires time. It isn’t just a one-time event, but an on-going process. One analysis will lead to another, and another, and so on. Similarly, collecting and cleaning your data are also constant operations.
• Complex: Data analysis is also a complex process. Yes, there are simple analyses you can conduct with relative ease, even as a beginner. But, the insights that drive impactful changes often need in-depth analysis, which requires an analytical mind and an extensive understanding of data science.
• Cost: Whether you need to hire a data professional or invest in sophisticated analytics software or other tools, proper analysis can cost you.

 

Beware Of Fatigue And Other Data-Related Obstacles

Other analysis obstacles come when dealing with large volumes of data.

While every source of data is valuable in its own right, conducting a successful data analysis is very much a matter of right time, right data.

As we mentioned earlier, it is important to only focus on the data streams relevant to the goal of that specific project.

Otherwise, you can run into issues of data fatigue.

Data fatigue is a relatively new term coined by analytics experts. It varies in definition, but the cause is always the same: too much data.

There are three common ways that data fatigue manifests itself:

1.) Picking the right data sources: Today’s businesses have a multitude of data sources. It’s where we get the concept of ‘big data.’ As hinted above, there’s a significant challenge for marketers to know which data sets work together and yield the right, relevant results.

When the wrong data sets are paired together, there are two main gigantic risks. First, irrelevant data sources in an analysis can get in the way of the accurate conclusions that your business desires. Second, and worst of all, when incorrect correlations between data sets are accepted as fact, businesses follow them deep into the rabbit hole, only to find a dead end.

2.) Too much at once: Businesses try and procure the maximum amount of value by analyzing everything at the same time. Yet, they quickly become saturated in information to the point that they can barely figure out which insight to listen to first.

It’s the classic child at Disney World syndrome. Everything is exciting all at once, but by the time you’ve ridden Pirates of the Caribbean twice and took a photo with Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck, and had a late-afternoon “dinner” consisting of an extra-large cola and cotton candy, that over-the-moon-excited feeling is quickly being surpassed by a cumbersome sugar crash.

The remedy? Take your time and don’t let data overwhelm you!

3.) Following data to a fault: Data is a potent tool that helps fuel better decision-making processes. But, some businesses become so driven by the data and analytics that they neglect the opinions and experiences of their staff. Not only does this undervalue your in-house experts, but it also chokes creativity. Sometimes, taking a creative risk can pay off huge! Also, becoming entirely data-driven requires a very deep understanding of data science and extremely sophisticated systems.

How To Perform An Effective PPC Account Audit

Now that we’ve discussed the many details related to PPC data analysis, we can get into the how-to section. Since data analysis can include a wide range of projects, we’ll look at a simple PPC account audit.

What Is A PPC Account Audit

Auditing your PPC account means conducting a detailed and structured evaluation of your goals, campaigns, settings and other related components. The purpose of this audit is to find attention-worthy issues in the PPC  account.

The ideal outcome is that identifying these attention-worthy items will lead to actionable insights towards improving your campaigns.

Step 1: Goals Audit

Advertisers spend a lot of time investigating their keywords, ad groups and other campaign details. What they often neglect is auditing their PPC goals.

Remember, this is the driving force behind your strategies. So, if your goal is off, everything that follows will also falter. It’s like having a craving for Chinese food, but you accidentally drive to the Italian restaurant instead.

Here are some questions to consider when auditing your PPC goals:

• Is your primary conversion goal working? Is there another action that may produce better results?
• Is conversion tracking enabled and working correctly?
• Is there enough data to establish cost per action, value per conversion and other goal-related metrics?
• Are there notable customer trends that reflect a solid buying cycle?
• Does it make sense to enable call tracking?

 

Step 2: Campaign Audit

With our goals reaffirmed (or adjusted), we can now audit our campaigns. This is where we want to tighten the nuts and bolts of our campaigns and make any necessary changes to help produce better results moving forward.

Areas of concern for auditing your PPC campaigns include:

• Are you running a search or display campaign? Is there value in the other option?
• Have you organized ad groups in a logical manner that digs down into deep audience targeting?
• Are there campaigns in place that focus on retargeting past customers and site visitors?
• For Display Network campaigns, are you using the appropriate targeting options?
• Are you using a manual or smart bidding approach? Is it time to switch?
• Is your billing information up to date? You don’t want a billing issue to shut down your PPC efforts
• Are you running YouTube ad campaigns? If not, should you be?

 

Step 3: Keywords Audit

Now we move into the smaller details of our campaigns: keywords. We’ve talked at length about the importance of managing keywords already. For our PPC audit, we’ll evaluate the following questions:

• What are your top-performing keywords? And the worst performers?
• Are there any keywords performing unexpectedly?
• Do any terms need to be added to your negative keyword list?
• Have you considered keywords with high user intent?
• Are keywords clustered in the right ad groups?
• Is each keyword relevant to the resulting landing page?
• Are you highlighting keywords with localized intent?
• How about terms with high buying intent?

 

Step 4: Bid & Budget Audit

Next to keywords, you also need to audit your bidding strategies. Optimizing your bids means keeping your budget well allocated to produce the best returns.

You need to ask yourself the following:

• Are you adjusting bids appropriately based on geography, device, time and other parameters?
• For display ads, are you adjusting bids based on gender, age or interests?
• What are your most expensive keywords? Is the investment worth it?
• Are you losing potential impressions because of bid/budget restraints?
• Are there any active ad groups with little-or-no conversions that need to be deactivated?

 

Step 5: Settings Audit

Often, we set and forget our campaign settings. This is fine for the short-term, but, after a while, we need to review these options and make sure they still make sense for our campaigns. You may even be neglecting certain settings that are hurting your PPC ads!

Here are some questions to evaluate:

• Have you enabled the ‘include search partners’ option?
• Are you using dayparting settings to target audiences at the right time of day?
• Are you correctly targeting the right languages?
• If you’re running campaigns on Google’s Search Network, do you have enhanced CPC selected?
• Also with Search Network ads, make sure your ads are not appearing below the first page
• Do your settings allow for advertisements to rotate correctly?
• Have you prohibited ads from running on sites unrelated to your business?

 

Step 6: Ads Audit

No matter how optimized your keywords, settings and other components are, it’s all for nothing if your ads aren’t compelling. Bad ad copy doesn’t draw attention, nor does it entice those vital clicks that you need to fuel conversions.

Here are the questions to explore in your ads audit:

• Are you split testing ads in your different groups? For both mobile and desktop?
• Are you testing different types of ad components?
• Do you have different banner sizes available for display ads?
• Are you effectively using text and image ads together?
• Is ‘Click to Call’ enabled on your mobile ads?
• Do your ads link to the right landing pages? Are all of the links working?
• Have you thoroughly vetted your ads for spelling and grammar mistakes?
• Does each ad include the correct feature, benefit, offer, etc.?

 

Step 7: Landing Page Audit

While your landing pages are technically outside the realm of your Google Ads account, they directly impact your metrics and campaign performance. Thus, it is essential to include them in your PPC audit.

Specifically, think about these questions:

• Are you optimizing different landing pages for each ad group?
• Are you split testing landing pages?
• Do your landing pages respond well to mobile devices?
• Are your landing pages equipped with heat map analysis, cart abandonment and other features that provide deeper insights?
• Is there only one offer per landing page?
• How many steps from the landing page to completed action are there? Can this be reduced?

 

Step 8: Compare To Past Audits!

As you perform more audits, you’ll have a thorough record of your entire PPC strategy overtime. It’s a good practice to evaluate your latest review based on previous benchmarks.

Is your CPA moving in a positive or negative direction after the last audit? This will help you see if the changes from your last audit had the desired effect. If they didn’t, you can analyze further and see where the disconnect occurs.

Conclusions

The bottom line is this: you can’t run successful PPC campaigns without listening to your data. PPC without data is like baking or cooking without measurements. You can do it, but the results won’t be nearly as good.

We hope that this resource helps you better utilize your data to achieve optimal results in your pay per click advertising.

If you’re struggling with conducting your own PPC audit, the PPCexpo Account Audit Report tool can simplify the process and connect you to actionable insights quicker.