Performance is suffering in your Google Ads account but you don’t know why because you are not aware of properly with PPC campaign optimization strategies.
– You need to focus on keyword intent properly
– You need to have right audience targeting
– You should not ignore right device , right locations on right time.
– You should generate combinations of metrics and dimensions to find out some patterns in complex data.
It’s a problem that every PPC manager faces on a routine basis. With so many moving parts across all of your various campaigns, it can be a struggle to pinpoint the exact genesis of a shift in performance.
It doesn’t have to be a loss of performance; even positive shifts can cause you to scratch your head and wonder about the source.
One of the best ways to keep a steady pulse on your account is to conduct a campaign performance analysis. This enables you to track your data at every step.
Unfortunately, the size, speed and complexity of PPC data create several analysis problems for marketers. Getting accurate results from your campaign performance analysis can be incredibly difficult and a giant expenditure of your time – unless you have the right tools.
AI technology has been like a life preserver tossed out into the ocean of data that threatens to swallow PPC marketers.
By automating this tedious part of campaign management, marketers can keep their heads above the data and quickly discover what’s behind the ebbs and flows of their accounts.
This discussion will look at how automation helps you check why PPC performance has changed and what to do with these discoveries.
When you launch a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, it is not an end; it’s a beginning. You can think of your campaign as a boat on the water. Once it goes live, you’re shoving off from the dock and out to sea.
Throughout the journey, you need to devote yourself to tracking and studying your campaign’s progress.
You need to know factors to optimize PPC campaigns and measure its successes and failures and make course corrections when needed to maximize your returns.
You are, after all, the captain of your campaigns!
There are a few factors you need to consider.
First off, it’s crucial to understand that data takes time to mature and become useful in gauging success.
Most PPC campaigns are built for the long term. Your ads are likely set to run indefinitely, unless it’s a short or seasonal campaign.
To measure success, you need long-term data. You can’t use a week’s worth of data to guide your campaigns. You need to look at months or even years of data.
Similarly, you can’t compare the success of a new campaign to one that’s been live for months.
Data requires time.
Arguably, the best overall metric for gauging the success of your PPC campaigns is ROI. This is your return on investment. What did you put into your ads and what did you get a result of that investment?
You want your campaigns to be profitable and you can’t have high profits with equally high (or higher) costs.
Essentially, ROI is a measure of how well you are spending your ad budget.
To maximize your ROI, you need to know what components are wasting your ad dollars and which ones are generating the best returns. Then, you can eliminate the waste and improve your returns.
While ROI is a great benchmark to use, there are many other metrics that are critical to the success of your campaigns. These are known as key performance indicators (KPIs).
KPIs are metrics with close ties to your campaign goals. If you want to drive revenue, you want to look at conversions, conversion value and other end-of-funnel data for PPC campaign optimization.
Once your data has enough time to mature, KPIs are the areas that require most of your attention. Changes to these data elements need to be tracked closely because they will directly impact progress towards your goals.
You don’t have to go about gauging the success of your PPC campaigns alone. There are many tools available that can help you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Even the Google Ads dashboard can be a goldmine of valuable benchmarks to track your performance.
You should familiarize yourself with these tools and determine which ones offer the best assistance in tracking your performance.
PPC campaign optimization and reviewing your campaign performance is an ongoing process. In a perfect world, you would monitor your data 24/7.
Of course, this isn’t possible without the help of automation and AI tools.
That said, if you are manually reviewing your PPC campaign performance, there are a few moments when checking in on your strategies is crucial:
Reviewing your PPC campaign performance should be on your daily to-do list as an account manager. Remember, your data is constantly changing; every interaction with an ad creates shifts in your metrics.
So, if you aren’t routinely checking in, you could be missing valuable opportunities or potentially harmful risks in your campaigns.
You want to learn from your past successes and failures and apply that knowledge to future endeavors and campaign optimization strategies.
Before you start a new campaign, look at your past efforts to see what works and what doesn’t. Use these insights to shape your new strategy and ensure it gets off on the right foot.
Every good objective incorporates the element of time. This puts you on a timeline for achieving that goal.
Do you want to see the result in 30 days? 6 months? 5 years? Whatever timeline you set, you want to assess your performance at that point.
Evaluate your results and determine whether or not you succeeded in reaching that objective.
As we’ve discussed with ROI, how you utilize your budget is a crucial factor in the success of your campaigns.
Whenever you are planning your PPC budget or adjusting how that money is allocated across your campaigns, you need to review your performance.
You want to know where to place your budget and also
where to remove spending, it should be part of your PPC optimization strategies.
The core purpose of the campaign performance analysis is to help you understand what works and what doesn’t. When it comes to PPC campaigns, there are many ways that you can apply this lesson.
In short, a PPC performance analysis will help you identify the best and worst parts of your account.
A typical campaign performance analysis will follow a set of steps. Having this structured process will make the investigation smoother. However, it still doesn’t beat automation.
You need to be actively monitoring your campaign performance to know if you have an issue.
It’s worth reiterating that this “problem” may not be a problem at all. A positive change in your account could be a sign that there’s a valuable opportunity waiting to be tapped.
Once you’ve identified a noteworthy change, you can begin investigating further.
You’ve detected a change, whether negative or positive. Now, you need to dig into the data to discover where to begin.
It’s not always apparent what was the catalyst for the change because there can be several factors at play.
You need to apply your expertise as a PPC manager to decide where to start looking for answers.
After you’ve dug into your campaigns to determine the change’s source and the starting point of your analysis, you need to start drilling deeper.
You have to consider what’s changing, what’s influencing the change and how that change impacts other areas of your campaign.
Start at the campaign level and then work your way down to ad groups and even individual keywords.
This step will help you better understand the source. You may even be able to draw some initial conclusions about why the shift in performance occurred.
In step 4, you want to continue drilling deeper into your account data. At this point, you can begin looking at individual metrics in the campaigns that you’ve determined are affected.
Again, one change may involve many different metrics. So, it’s wise to look across the board and see how each metric is performing compared to normal.
Looking at your metrics will help you further understand the cause behind the performance change.
One of the best strategies for digging deeper into your metrics is a top-down investigation. This starts with a primary KPI and then moves down through related metrics.
For example, you might start by comparing conversions from this month to last. You discover that you have fewer conversions now than you did in the past.
To find out why this is, you have to look at factors that drive conversions, like clicks or conversion rate. If you don’t find your answer there, you may have to look at factors that drive clicks (CTR, impressions, impression share, etc.)
You continue this top-down process until you find your answers.
You can also approach your data investigation with a bottom-up approach, which is essentially the reverse of the top-down method.
With this technique, you start at the smallest elements of your account and move up to larger pieces of the puzzle.
What’s the difference between the two? When you go top to bottom, you may miss certain details because the overall averages are steady. Conversely, the bottom-up investigation uncovers even the most minor changes – changes that would otherwise go undetected.
Your campaign performance analysis shouldn’t look at your Google Ads data alone. Your website analytics is also an important piece that needs to be incorporated into solving the puzzle.
If your conversion rates are down, the answer won’t be available in your Google Ads data. You need to look at your analytics to see your bounce rates, dwell times and other metrics. This will help you determine the success or failure of your landing pages.
To decrease your bounce rates, you may need to develop new pages with more relevance to the target keyword.
Time frame is an element of analysis that marketers can sometimes forget. We recommend starting by comparing two similar periods, like this month to last, or year-over-year.
Comparing one week to the next can create some issues with data accuracy. However, looking at several weeks in a row and even comparing performance on individual days can be helpful. You may be able to determine which days of the week are best for your strategies.
Time helps you uncover when a change in performance occurred. You can use this information to figure out the cause. It may be a new competitor that has emerged on the ad market or a prior change to your campaigns that produced unintended results.
Following all 8 steps of a campaign performance analysis can take a lot of time and resources. If you have a large Google Ads account, it may be impossible to check every part, which means some performance changes will go undetected.
You have the tools, data and expertise required to analyze all the information and get to the roots of performance changes. What you don’t have is time, mainly because you need to review PPC campaigns on a daily basis.
This is where automation steps to the plate.
Some marketers try to steer away from machine learning and AI. The thought of handing control of your campaigns over to a machine can be a terrifying prospect.
While AI has the power to analyze your data and make data-informed decisions effortlessly, it isn’t a replacement for the “human touch.” It doesn’t have the adaptability and marketing expertise to make strategic, creative decisions.
It’s crucial to realize that automation is not the solution for every aspect of campaign management. You still maintain full control over the most critical tasks.
Automation enables you to commit all of your time towards these high-priority tasks, leaving the AI to watch your data and analyze it for performance changes.
It works 24/7 and is much faster at processing data than humans. It’s not about giving up control; it’s about making the most of your time.
Plus, when you optimize how you spend your time, you increase your ROI. You can focus your attention on things that actually move your performance needle, like driving more conversions and eliminating wasted spend.
After you set your campaign goals, you start monitoring your metrics and making adjustments as needed. It sounds like an easy enough job on paper.
However, as your account grows and you add more and more campaigns, it quickly becomes overwhelming. You have too much going on and too little time to track it all effectively.
You need help.
PPC Signal is an AI-powered management tool for your PPC campaigns. PPC Signal automatically grabs the real-time data from your campaign metrics and returns actionable signals that alert you to changes in your performance.
Essentially, PPC Signal conducts an ongoing campaign performance analysis for your account.
PPC Signal’s automated system eliminates the need to track and monitor your campaigns manually. The tool does it for you and returns only the most noteworthy changes to your performance.
With PPC Signal’s system, you quickly zero in on the areas of your account that need immediate attention, whether it’s positive opportunities or harmful risks.
The agility of PPC Signal is crucial to the success of its users.
For instance, imagine that your cost per click values are unexpectedly rising in one of your campaigns. You’re suddenly paying twice as much as expected for each click. Not only does this hurt your returns, but it depletes your budget rapidly.
Every day that this performance change goes unnoticed, you continue to overpay for these clicks and potentially waste your budget.
Timing also impacts the value of your PPC opportunities. If there is an emerging keyword gaining popularity, you want to be one of the first to capitalize. This allows you to take full advantage of lower bid costs and less competition until other marketers catch on.
Thanks to PPC Signal, you can mitigate risks and seize opportunities to ensure that your growth is always on a steady incline.
Every business is different and has its own goals. How you gauge your performance is unique to you. Thus, you also should have your own approach to campaign performance analysis.
PPC Signal doesn’t change this. When you access the tool, it shows you every active signal in your account. You can then filter the results to find the changes that are most relevant to your goals.
In the above example, signals are being filtered by the metric type of CTR. You can filter by any metric, as well as:
These options allow you to work your data the way you see fit. You can focus on a specific metric that aligns with your goals. Maybe you want to start with your most effective campaign first. How you approach your active signals is up to you!
Automation should be taking work off your plate, not adding to it. Yet, many other management solutions falter at this stage. They let you know that a change has occurred, but give few details about why or where it’s happening. You have to find this information yourself.
Every performance change that the PPC Signal detects is a fully-vetted and verified insight ready for action. Each signal comes with all of the data you need.
There is no additional effort or analysis expected of you to get to the bottom of what’s happening. In this one alert, you can see:
You can open a more expanded view of any signal by clicking Explore.
Here you can see how the data has acted in the past compared to now. You can add additional metrics to this chart to see how one signal may be impacting other metrics.
Alternatively, you can view the data as a table, which can then be exported to a spreadsheet.
Still not sure what to do to do with the signal? In the Explore menu, you’ll notice the Take Action button.
This feature uses PPC Signal’s AI to suggest the next step for resolving a signal. It may be decreasing a bid, pausing a keyword or another action.
It’s another way that PPC Signal delivers you an actionable insight from start to finish.
When you’re pressed for time or trying to resolve many campaign performance changes at once, this is a highly beneficial feature.
You don’t have to analyze the data and choose the best course of action. With PPC Signal’s suggested action, you can enact fast changes that directly improve your account.
It’s also beneficial to new marketers that may not have the expertise to choose the correct next step in the process.
Part of the reason why experts recommend that you conduct a campaign performance analysis daily is that it creates a scenario where progress and growth can be continuous.
In manual analysis, the challenge is consistently identifying areas of improvement. Since manual analysis is slower and less efficient, you may only find performance changes once or twice a week.
With PPC Signal, you always have active alerts reporting on the latest performance changes to your account. That means that you have ways to improve your account every single day.
By resolving each signal (avoiding risks, grabbing opportunities, etc.), you produce positive changes to your campaigns daily.
Even if you commit yourself to fix just one or two signals a day, it produces a positive increase in performance.
When you stack these small increases, you create an unbeatable advantage over time. Competitors won’t be able to outperform you simply by throwing more money at their ads.
Delivering right message to the right audience within a planned budget measure the real success of a campaign.
PPC Signal is a best tool to analyze your campaign performance. It can give you insights which you can’t find in other tools, in its dashboard you can see all the signals which really needs your attention.
Three metrics are very important to explore very closely in your campaigns, clichthorugh rate, conversion rate and cost per conversion.
PPC requires constant attention and monitoring.
Running a campaign performance analysis is necessary to manage the many factors and moving parts involved in managing a Google Ads account.
Unfortunately, handling this analysis without the help of an AI solution is more trouble than it’s ultimately worth. There are only so many variables and factors you can analyze on your own.
PPC Signal really comes to the rescue in this regard.
Not only does it constantly monitor your account for performance changes, but it also packages each shift in performance as a convenient insight ready to be unpacked and resolved.
With PPC Signal keeping tabs on your performance changes, you can put all of your energy and time towards improving and growing your campaigns.
That’s the advantage of automation.
We will help your ad reach the right person, at the right time
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