How to Use Actionable Insights for Google Ads (AdWords) Campaign Optimization

In case you haven’t heard, data is the new oil. By focusing on data in your Google Ads reporting, you can potentially maximize returns in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. However, data driven PPC analysis will only live up to its potential if you understand how to do it correctly.

This all comes down to actionable insights. Actionable insight is information that makes us aware of interesting new developments that we are actually able to do something about. It makes us aware of change, and helps use see that specific action is possible now. For example, Google Ads recognized that many advertisers were struggling to optimize their campaigns, so with that actionable insight, the company introduced Smart Campaigns to help their users.

In terms of data analytics and advertising, PPC actionable insights are the results that we can use to guide our decision-making.

When you understand the PPC actionable insights data provides, you can master Google Ads campaign optimization.

In this definitive guide, we’ll explore data-driven PPC analysis at several key levels, helping you to become an expert at Google Ads reporting.

How Can Actionable Insights Help In PPC Reporting?

PPC advertising doesn’t work with a ‘set and forget’ attitude. Its success relies on a committed approach that comprises consistent monitoring and experimenting with new strategies and permutations. This method of Google Ads campaign optimization is intrinsically linked to PPC actionable insights.

In the PPC reporting life cycle, advertisers have a vast array of recurring tasks, such as:

Weekly Tasks

• Project Performance – Check if you are on track for your goals and adjust accordingly.
• Display Network Review – Optimize your ad placement and exclusions from unwanted sites.
• Pause Underperforming Keywords – Curb budget waste on terms that aren’t delivering.

 

Bi-weekly Tasks

• Negative Keyword Additions – Identify irrelevant search terms to list as negative keywords, which filter out unqualified traffic.
• Keyword Expansion – Discover new opportunities from competitors, keyword tools, and PPC reports.
• Ad Review – Evaluate ad performance, trade out underperforming ones for new ideas.

 

Monthly Tasks

• Check Campaign Settings – Analyze campaigns to optimize targeting and correct any setting errors.
• Landing Page Review – Identify weak pages to remove, and create new pages based on top-performers.
• Monthly Keyword Comparison – Compare performance with previous months and identify significant changes by using PPC reporting tool

 

Bi-Monthly Tasks

• Geotargeting – Determine locations where performance is high or low.
• Day Parting – Find optimum hours and days for peak performance.
• Historical Performance Review – Discover trends in long-term data. Your PPC reporting tool can help to discover trends that were never seen before.

 
This barely scratches the surface of the work involved as a PPC manager. But here is the important thing to know:

Actionable insights can help you make smarter decisions at every stage of the PPC life cycle. By using data-driven PPC insights, you can save time by quickly making informed decisions, which ultimately maximizes your return on investment (ROI) in PPC advertising. Make sure you measure your account frequently and use the right PPC reporting tool.

How to Categorize Actionable Insights In Data-Driven PPC Analysis

Before we dive into data-driven PPC insights, let’s take a look at the key aspects and metrics marketers should be monitoring in their PPC reports.

1. Attributes

The core components of a PPC campaign, such as Match Types, Campaign Type, Bid Strategy, Quality Score, Targeting etc.

2. Performance Metrics

Performance indicators such as Clicks, Impressions, Clickthrough Rate (CTR), Average Cost Per Click (CPC), and Ad Position.

3. Conversion Metrics

This includes values like Conversions, Conversion Rate, Cost per Conversion, Conversion Value and Conversion Spend, which provide performance insights at a deeper level.

4. Attribution Metrics

Metrics that help you understand the customer journey to conversion. For example, Click-Assisted Conversions and Impression-Assisted Conversions.

5. Competitive Metrics

In bidding competitions, it’s important to know when you are winning or losing. You can keep an eye on this by tracking competitive metrics like Total Impression Share or Lost Impressions Share.

How to Get PPC Actionable Insights from Google Ads Attributes

So, now that you understand the five categories, let’s explore them. We’ll start off by seeing how we can measure and use data-driven PPC insights from attributes data in our PPC reporting.

Match Type and Device Analysis

These aspects provide insights about your ad copy performance. You can identify patterns and behaviors in impressions share with the chart below.

We can learn a lot from this chart. More importantly, we can use it to guide our PPC efforts.

• Identify which match type gets the most impressions – Exact Match – and increase bids on those. Reduce bids on low-performing match types.
• Similarly, identify top performers and low performers in device type.
• If you have a limited budget, opt out of mobile devices if they are underperforming.
• Bid more on keywords that trigger your ads on desktop.

 

Targeting

When it comes to Google Ads campaign optimization, audience targeting is paramount, and there are many ways in which to do it.

Device Targeting

You can set bids for various devices.

What to do:

• Identify top performing device types.
• Disable ads on low-performing devices that generate few conversions.
• For call-only campaigns, target only mobile phone devices.
• Use the Analysis by Device feature to detect problems.

 

Demographic Targeting

This is targeting by factors like gender, age range or income.

What to do:

• Consider how many impressions are from males, and how many impressions lead to clicks.
• If your ad campaign is for a female cosmetic product, these male impressions are incurring wasted spend.
• Optimize your PPC campaign by targeting the demographic that is most likely to convert.

 

Time Targeting

Schedule your ad for certain days or times to maximize impressions and engagement.

What to do:

• Analyze the Hour of Day data to determine the peak hours – which are the most profitable?
• Develop an understanding of traffic patterns to your ad at various times.
• Determine the times that generate quality traffic.
• Adjust your bids to display your ad at these times.
• Use the same strategy to analyze Day of Week.

 

Geo-Targeting

This is one of the best PPC actionable insights for small businesses targeting local audiences. You can tailor your ads to people in specific areas.

What to do:

• Gauge location performance with the ratio to impressions.
• Identify geographical regions with relevant audiences for your products and services.
• Analyze click stats to determine if developing or decreasing interest in specific areas.
• Focus your campaign on the most promising areas.
• Exclude locations that are yielding poor impression performance or generating excessive wasted spend.

 

Quality Score

Quality Score is a rating from Google on the current quality and relevance of your keywords and ads. It is an important component of PPC reporting that is determined by three key factors:

• Ad Relevance
• Landing Page Experience
• Expected Clickthrough Rate

 

This chart depicts the impact of each factor on quality score, making it easy to highlight problems with your ad.

What to do:

• Use Ad Relevance to check if your landing page content is aligned with user search queries.
• Use Landing Page Experience to enhance the page structure so that it delivers on the visitor’s needs. Navigation should be smooth and clear to understand.

 

How to Get PPC Actionable Insights from Google Ads Performance Metrics

The next aspect of Google Ads reporting that we can gather PPC actionable insights from is in our performance metrics. This is a huge part of data-driven PPC analysis that tracks the customer journey.

Impressions

An impression is the number of times your ad displays for a search query. More impressions increase the chances of your ad being clicked on. The customer journey starts with the impression, and so it is the first step in PPC campaign performance analysis.

Impression Share (IS)

Impression Share is the impressions you’ve received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. If your ad could have been triggered 10 times but received just 5 impressions, the impression share is 50%.

Low impression share can be caused by Ad Rank or budget limitations. From the chart, we can see the ad lost impressions due to Ad Rank. Using these PPC actionable insights, you can focus on improving your Ad Rank, which in turn will improve impression share.

If your impression share is hampered by budget restrictions, you can revise the campaign budget as follows:

• Select the Campaign you wish to edit.
• Click Settings >
• Navigate to the daily budget, then click Edit
• Enter the new budget.
• Click Save.

 

Opportunity

In PPC advertising, Opportunity is the number of impressions your Ad is eligible to receive.

Opportunity = Total eligible Impressions – Impression Received

You can measure Opportunity to determine your ad’s standing in terms of impressions. A higher value is a sign you need to work on your Google Ads campaign optimization. Consider increasing keyword bids on terms that have most of your current impression share.

Exact match IS

This metric denotes how closely aligned your campaign is with user search queries. It is the difference

between a tightly-controlled PPC campaign, and a reckless, unprofitable campaign.

Exact Match IS = impressions received for exact match keywords / estimated # of eligible impressions for exact match keywords

It’s important to note that this calculation is irrespective of match types. Thorough data-driven PPC analysis on this metric will consider parameters like Device Type, Dayparting and Keywords Tail Length.

If you have a low impression share on only broad matches, run a search term report and do the following:

• Determine searches that don’t exactly match your keywords.
• Increase impression share by adding close matches as keywords, and increasing their bids.
• Add irrelevant terms as negative keywords.

 

Clicks

The second stage of the customer journey is Clicks. Users can interact with ads by clicking on it or calling the number listed in the ad.

Each click that takes a visitor to the landing page is counted, as are all clicks on mobile devices that lead to people making calls to your business.

A higher number of clicks indicates:

• An appealing ad that engages users.
• Increased interest in whatever you are offering.
• High relevance between search queries and ad copy.

 
Here are some tips to increase clicks:

• Research your audience to create better, more relevant headlines and copy.
• Insert answers to user queries in the headlines.
• Include a strong call-to-action in all headlines.
• Use vital keywords in the ad URL

 
We have several key variables to get PPC actionable insights from at this stage.

Click Share

This is the percentage of clicks your ad received relative to the total eligible clicks. It depends on your ad’s prominence in search results, and also the number of ads shown for each search query.

Click Share can enhance Google Ads campaign optimization by:

• Providing a holistic view of your traffic sources, allowing more accurate projections and smarter marketing decisions.
• Helping you identify channels and product groups with the potential to boost traffic. You can increase bids on these to improve ad feed quality.
• Offering quick PPC actionable insights into audience engagement and ad relevance.

 

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

In PPC reports, CTR is the percentage of viewers that click your ad.

CTR = (total number of clicks / total number of ad impressions) * 100

A higher CTR inevitably leads to a higher conversion rate, as more traffic is likely to result in more

conversions. Therefore, CTR is one of the most important metrics in data-driven PPC analysis.

What to do:

• Identify the peak time for CTR (I.e. between 6 am and 6 pm).
• Run your ad during peak hours to maximize clicks, which optimizes your budget.
• Understand that CTR directly impacts Quality Score, so a high CTR is a sign your ad is of high quality and relevance for your audience.

 

Cost

Cost is a major concern in all data-driven PPC reports. For many marketers, low costs are the ultimate measure of success.

Cost = Clicks * Avg. Cost Per Click (CPC)

You can optimize cost by tweaking several factors, including demographics, device type, and time. This chart shows daily trends for an Ads campaign cost and its components.

What to do:

• If clicks and Avg. CPC both rise it means CPC is driving your clicks, which increases your cost. If you don’t see this pattern in your data-driven PPC analysis, then something else is driving the clicks (e.g. quality score).
• Filter out low-ROI keywords that don’t generate much impression share, then pause them to reduce cost and earn a better Avg. CPC. Ideally, you should bid on keywords that trigger your ads for the most relevant queries.

 

Cost Per Click (CPC)

CPC is the price for each click in a PPC campaign. It is influenced by three key factors:

• Maximum Bid
• Ad Rank
• Competition

 
You must try to minimize CPC.

What to do:

• View CPC by search terms to identify keywords worth bidding on.
• Bid higher on keywords with a low CPC.
• Be mindful of relevance, search volume, and CTR trends while bidding.
• Aim for a higher quality score, as Google Ads reduces CPC for ads with a high quality
• Monitor performance regularly.

 

From the chart above, you can see CPC is higher on mobile compared to desktop. You can adjust your budget accordingly. Also, as phrase match keywords have a higher CPC than exact match, it makes sense to bid more on the latter.

Ad Position Metrics

For a long time, Average Position was a big consideration in PPC reports. However, Google Ads made some big changes in 2018, introducing four new search ad position metrics to the dashboard:

• (Absolute Top) % is the total percentage of ad impressions when your ad is the first ad above the organic search results.
• (Top) % is the total percentage of impressions when displayed in any position above the organic results.
• Search (Absolute Top) IS measures ad impression share for the absolute top position. This is calculated by dividing the total impressions for that position by the estimated number of eligible impressions for your ad in that spot.
• Search (Top) IS divides the total ad impressions received in any position above the organic results by the estimated number of eligible impressions you could have received in that position.

 
When your ad appears above the organic search results, it’s more likely to get a higher CTR, which enhances quality score. Before, there was some confusion about the average position metric, but these new metrics let you know exactly what position your ad is in on the search results pages.

Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of clicks that resulted in a single page visit before the user abandoned the website. A high bounce rate indicates something is deterring people from staying on your website, such as:

• The landing page is slow to load.
• Your landing page is irrelevant or inconsistent with the ad copy.
• A cluttered or distracting landing page is making the user experience (UX) frustrating or confusing.
• Visitors aren’t interested in your content.

 
Ultimately, you need to understand your target audience and develop ad copy and landing pages that correspond to their needs and interests. With Google Ads campaign optimization, you can create more relevant content that keeps people interested.

Average Session Duration

Average Session Duration = total duration of all sessions (in seconds) / number of sessions

This metric directly interprets the traffic quality, so a higher rate is a good sign. If it is low, that means users aren’t engaging your landing page. Chances are you are attracting irrelevant traffic or else there are issues that must be fixed.

What to do:

• Improve the readability of web pages and text.
• Use an interactive, user-friendly design.
• Create blog content tailored to the users’ focus.
• Use visual content to maintain interest.
• Encourage comments and feedback with CTAs.

 
Add internal links to encourage visitors to explore your website.

From the chart above, Exact Match Type keywords generate the highest session duration. That implies that those keywords are attracting the most relevant, high-quality traffic. PPC actionable insights like this help you optimize your keyword targeting.

How to Get PPC Actionable Insights from Google Ads Conversion Metrics

Next up we have conversion metrics. This is always an exciting part of PPC reports, as it is where we can determine the success or failure of our efforts.

Conversion

This is the ultimate step in the customer journey. A conversion is when a visitor completes an action that you have set as your campaign goal. For example, a product purchase, email subscription, download or phone call.

Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate = Conversions / Clicks

The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that converted. A high rate is a good sign of success, whereas a low rate indicates issues in the customer journey. If you have a low rate, you need to focus on conversion rate optimization.

What to do:

• Pause the campaign while you figure out the issues – this will save your budget.
• Consider bidding more on keywords with a higher impression share.
• Make your checkout process smooth and easily understandable.
• Include the related products on the landing pages.

 
Add CTAs and offers in the Ad headline. This can boost CTR and conversions.

Considering the data above, we can see quality traffic is best between 5 am and 11 am. With data-driven PPC insights, we can adjust strategies to improve conversion rate.

How to Get PPC Actionable Insights from Google Ads Attribution Metrics

Many marketers shy away from the challenge of multi-channel marketing. Tracking the customer journey isn’t easy, but it’s worth the effort. While you may be tempted to focus on one channel, by ignoring others, you lose out. Some channels attract traffic, while others engage it.

The Multi-Channel Funnels feature in Google Ads offers data-driven PPC insights across multiple channels, campaigns, and devices. This helps you track the journey, seeing how customers land on one channel, moved to second, and finally convert on the third.

What to do:

• Don’t give too much credit to the channel that is directly generating your conversions. Doing this may lead you to unwittingly cut your budget on assisting channels.
• Consider Assisted Conversions to see how channels co-operate.
• Think about channel attribution to gain clear PPC actionable insights that will guide your decisions on multi-channel marketing.

 

How to Get PPC Actionable Insights from Google Ads Competitive Metrics

Lastly, we come to the competitive metrics. Spend analysis is an important thing to consider when you want to optimize your budget. This entails a few key metrics:

Wasted Spend

Wasted Spend is the share of your campaign budget that failed to lead to conversions. Analyzing this helps us find problematic match types, keywords, and channels.

This metric guides decision on whether to opt out of certain match types or devices to reduce wasted spend.

Conversion Spend

This is the cost of your conversions. You should aim to strike a balance between Conversion Spend and profits. If your CTR is rising but the conversion rate is falling, you can end up with a high Conversion Spend. By focusing on ad relevance and Quality Score, you may reduce the cost-per-click (CPC), which in turn will reduce your Conversion Spend.

ROAS

The PPC life cycle concludes with the Return on Ad Spend. This is the dollar amount you’ve earned per single dollar spent.

If you wanted to focus solely on the effectiveness of your ads, you should look at the return on ad spend (ROAS). This is a measure of an ad’s effectiveness not containing aspects such as cost of goods or other costs of the business.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

This is how much you pay to attain a conversion. Typically, CPA will be higher than cost-per-click (CPC), as not every user who clicks the ad will go on to convert.

CPA considers all ad clicks prior to a conversion, which means efforts to improve conversion rate can reduce your CPA.

What to do:

• Opt out of non-converting keywords.
• Add irrelevant keywords as negative keywords.
• Focus on improving Quality Score.

 

Data-Driven PPC Analysis Almost Guarantees Success

Google Ads campaign optimization is an ongoing endeavor that relies on your ability to deduce PPC actionable insights from your PPC reports. By focusing on data-driven PPC insights, you can identify anomalies in your campaigns. These issues can occur at any point in the customer journey, affecting impressions, clicks, costs or conversions.

You may have a landing page with high traffic but relatively few conversions. Perhaps you’re getting lots of conversions, but the ROAS is hardly worthwhile.

Nothing is perfect in paid advertising, and it’s only through constant monitoring and optimization that we can maximize our returns.

After everything we’ve explored, understand these three things:

• The more you know about your campaigns, the easier it is to make the right decisions.
• You must consider context, in terms of seasonal changes, targeting, and customer behaviors and interests.
• You must know your audience and tailor your campaigns accordingly.

 
In the end, with data-driven analysis at the heart of your efforts, you can change your strategy for basically every aspect of your campaign, and sooner or later, you will generate the results you deserve.

Check out the PPCexpo Reports Library to run free PPC reports that will help you leverage your data for bigger rewards.