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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 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.
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:
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.
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.
The core components of a PPC campaign, such as Match Types, Campaign Type, Bid Strategy, Quality Score, Targeting etc.
Performance indicators such as Clicks, Impressions, Clickthrough Rate (CTR), Average Cost Per Click (CPC), and Ad Position.
This includes values like Conversions, Conversion Rate, Cost per Conversion, Conversion Value and Conversion Spend, which provide performance insights at a deeper level.
Metrics that help you understand the customer journey to conversion. For example, Click-Assisted Conversions and Impression-Assisted Conversions.
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.
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.
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.
When it comes to Google Ads campaign optimization, audience targeting is paramount, and there are many ways in which to do it.
You can set bids for various devices.
What to do:
This is targeting by factors like gender, age range or income.
What to do:
Schedule your ad for certain days or times to maximize impressions and engagement.
What to do:
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:
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:
This chart depicts the impact of each factor on quality score, making it easy to highlight problems with your ad.
What to do:
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.
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 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:
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.
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:
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:
Here are some tips to increase clicks:
We have several key variables to get PPC actionable insights from at this stage.
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:
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:
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:
CPC is the price for each click in a PPC campaign. It is influenced by three key factors:
You must try to minimize CPC.
What to do:
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.
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:
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 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:
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 = 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:
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.
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.
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 = 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:
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.
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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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