Categories
Analytics is sometimes treated as a magic 8-ball that can answer any questions about your PPC campaigns.
“How come I’m not getting more customers through my PPC ads?”
Good question; let’s consult the analytics.
“Am I utilizing my ad budget to the fullest?”
Another great question! See what your analytics tells you.
“Which keywords should I be targeting?’
Your analytics can answer this question too.
There are hundreds of examples of marketing analytics solving the frequent questions and concerns of PPC managers.
Unfortunately, analytics is not as easy as using a magic 8-ball. You can’t shake the crystal ball and wait for it to spit out the answer.
Analytics is a time-consuming and complicated process that presents many challenges to marketers and PPC managers. One of the most significant obstacles is that this complex analytics process needs to be repeated regularly.
This discussion will look at examples of marketing analytics and the real-life challenges that can pop up while performing analytics for your PPC campaigns. By identifying these challenges, it is easier to overcome them in your efforts.
Before getting into the different types and challenges of marketing analytics, it’s important first to understand why it matters. What is the role that analytics plays in digital marketing? What can you do with the information?
One of the core purposes of marketing is to better understand your customers and how to serve them. This is even built into the foundation of your marketing mix. You want to know who your customers are, what they want, what they don’t want, when they want it, etc.
Every interaction is rich with data. This data will tell you everything you need to know about your customers. Analytics allows you to take all of the data from these interactions and make usable sense out of it.
Marketing is a highly competitive field where the first to act on an opportunity reap the most reward. Analytics can help you stay a step ahead of the competition.
By detecting trends, shifts, and other patterns, you can recognize these opportunities before or as they happen. These types of predictions can help you act first on valuable changes in the market.
When you’re able to understand both your customers and the market better, you can begin to optimize your strategies’ results.
By using what you learn from your analytics, you can adjust campaigns to cater to your customers’ most current needs and the market as a whole.
You’ll never have to guess what your next step should be because you have data to inform your decisions!
With your data, you’ll be able to decide which strategies to invest in accurately. This will dramatically improve marketing ROI.
Part of optimizing your results is also identifying areas of risk or loss. These red flags are strategies, targets, channels or other components that are no longer paying off and could be costing you valuable dollars.
When you identify an area of loss or wasted spend in your campaigns, it is crucial to investigate. Dig further into the data and find evidence to suggest why this loss is happening. What changed?
Ideally, you want to avoid surprises in your marketing campaigns. By regularly and consistently monitoring your analytics, you’ll be able to catch any problematic anomalies long before they grow into a more significant crisis.
This early warning system is vital in the PPC marketing space because campaign data changes so frequently and rapidly. You want to stay ahead of these changes as best you can.
More marketers are using smart AI-equipped tools because they offer a proactive management approach. This means that instead of reacting to changes, these tools provide the chance to act on changes and seize opportunities the moment they occur.
Often, these opportunities are things you would not normally have found on your own. Marketers tend to get stuck in familiar patterns. It can be hard to explore new sets of data because you don’t always know what you’re looking for.
In a way, these smart tools act like another team member to your marketing staff. It offers fresh angles to approach the data from, which ultimately produces more interesting and actionable insights.
The importance of marketing analytics can’t be overstated. The top brands in the Digital Age didn’t get there by chance. Companies like Amazon relentlessly take advantage of their analytics to find new ways to maximize their ROI, expand their business and stay on top of the competition.
Marketing data comes from many different sources and it can be analyzed using a variety of methods and models.
For example, you would use a different analysis model and measure other metrics when analyzing brand awareness than if you wanted to know how much revenue your PPC campaigns had generated for the month.
This section will cover many of the different types of marketing analysis options.
The current (present) and previous (past) analysis is one of the most common examples of marketing analytics at work. Marketers often find tremendous value from comparing the past period to the current one.
This is why things like quarterly reports exist. You need to know how your current performance tracks with where business was in the past. Have you improved or declined?
Current and previous data analysis can be used to track long-term progress, such as year-to-year changes, or short-term shifts. You could even use this analysis to compare day-to-day performance.
Customer segmentation helps you divide your entire customer base into logical groups of people that share similar attributes. There are many benefits to this practice.
For one, it makes your marketing more targeted and personalized, which can lead to much better performance. When you have very diverse audience segments, each will respond to different types of messages and offers.
The other benefit of conducting a customer segmentation analysis is that it makes your data easier to work with. Imagine trying to analyze data from 1,000,000 customers across the country all at once – that’s a headache.
When these one million customers are segmented into smaller groupings, the data is more manageable and more comfortable to analyze.
Successful marketing and advertising are always well-timed. You want your marketing messages and ads to appear at times when customers are active. If you aren’t hitting these key times, then you’re missing valuable interactions with prospective customers.
You also have to consider when your audiences are most receptive to certain offers and messages. You don’t want to push messages at times when they are not relevant. Instead, you want to anticipate needs and meet them with relevant offers at the perfect times.
The scheduling analysis helps you answer these “when” questions. You’ll also identify times when customers are not active or are unreceptive to ads. Avoiding these times will ensure that your ads don’t disrupt their activities and damage your customer experience.
Digital marketing is multi-faceted and often requires a team of individuals working together. Workflow has to do with what is getting done, who is doing it and when. This guarantees that every ad campaign and marketing strategy is cohesive.
Workflow analysis tools offer features to keep your team on task and on schedule, while also analyzing campaign data to discover new objectives to add to your workflow.
Essentially, workflow analysis helps your team become more efficient and productive when it comes to PPC management.
By supplementing your marketing analytics with sales and financial data, you can begin to analyze your customers’ lifetime value. This is how much a single customer will spend in their lifetime with your business. A high lifetime value suggests a very loyal customer that purchases frequently.
When you compare customer lifetime value figures across your different audience segments, you can begin to see what types of individuals are your most valuable targets. This information will impact your customer acquisition strategy, campaign targeting and more.
Intent is a huge factor in PPC marketing. Whenever a prospective customer or lead performs a search, there is an intent or purpose. Beyond the keywords they enter in the search box, there is an intent behind those search terms.
For instance, if you search, “visit the Grand Canyon,” your intent is to take a trip to the natural landmark. Tourist attractions in the area could find this keyword valuable. On the other hand, what if you search: “how deep is the Grand Canyon?” Now your intent is strictly to obtain information.
The customer intent analysis helps you select keywords with customer intent that aligns with your marketing goals. If your goal is to increase revenue, then you want to choose keywords that suggest an intention to convert.
PPCexpo Keyword Planner is a best tool to shortlist keywords for your digital marketing strategies.
The top performers analysis will help you identify which keywords, audience segments, locations, times, devices and other components provide the majority of your results. These are those critical parts of your go-to-market strategy that you absolutely need to optimize before the rest.
This is also known as the Pareto Principle or 80-20 Rule. It follows a simple ratio that suggests that approximately 80% of your results are created by 20% of your efforts.
This is not an exact measure, but an estimation to suggest that a small percentage of efforts produce most of your results. Roughly 80% of your performance comes from around 20% of your keywords.
When you can identify this powerful minority of activities that produce the majority of your results, you can ensure that your time and energy are spent on the most valuable and profitable areas of your PPC accounts.
On the topic of identifying your top performers, a similar analysis type is the resource allocation and prioritization method. This is another analysis type that aims to optimize how resources are spent in order to achieve the best results.
After all, you don’t want to be wasting time, staff and money on strategies that don’t produce optimal results.
With marketing analytics, you can begin asking the right questions to help your business and strategies grow. It’s about informing your thoughts and ideas with data and numbers.
Instead of “I think campaign A sounds better,” you can say, “Campaign A will perform better because it is similar to Campaign Z, which we ran this time last year and saw great results.”
Today’s marketing involves an ever-growing number of channels. Even if you look at PPC marketing on its own, there are still multiple channel types, ad networks and platforms that you need to consider.
The marketing channel analysis looks at data from paid, organic and social media channels to determine which ones bring the most customers to your brand and offer the most progress towards achieving your marketing goals.
Once you know the best channels, you can focus your attention and efforts on these strategic places.
The goal of these different analysis types all remain the same.
It’s about getting you to the point where you know your marketing performance from every angle. You remove the guesswork and replace it with data-informed decisions.
This does not mean letting data run the show. Instead, it means using your expertise, experience and know-how to make decisions. Then, use your data to justify those choices.
It’s the merger between your intuition as a marketer and the evidence of your data.
The more you dig into marketing analytics, the easier it becomes to make data-informed decisions. You begin to recognize things like what times your strategies are most effective, which channels produce the highest number of conversions, when to expect certain products or categories to increase or decrease in performance and so much more.
You’ll take fewer risks and make better overall decisions because you have the data and the experience to know which paths are the right ones to take to achieve the best results.
There are some essential steps that you need to follow when conducting your own analysis efforts. This section will provide a brief outline of these steps. You can apply this information to your analysis projects.
Your first job is to set your data requirements. In other words, what data do you need to build your model or analysis?
Part of this step involves setting your goals for the analysis. What do you hope to achieve by the end of the process? Are you setting out to answer a key question? Or, do you endeavor to discover a new approach to something?
Your data requirements act as the framework for the rest of the steps. You may find that you need to add to these requirements in later stages. That’s okay!
Now that you’ve set your data requirements, you have to collect the data that fits those parameters.
This is a fairly straightforward process, depending on the type of analysis you’re performing. Most of the data should be readily available.
However, there may be scenarios where you have to request information from external sources or overcome unexpected hurdles to extract the data you need.
The data collection process can also be a challenge if you’re not entirely sure what data fits into your requirements.
You may gather more information than you need, only to realize later that some of it doesn’t pertain to the analysis. That’s why it is crucial to set very specific data requirements in step 1.
You have a lot of data collected at this stage, but it needs to be organized before the analysis can begin.
In essence, you’ve collected all of the ingredients for your data analysis recipe. Now you need to prepare and organize each item to get them ready.
Spreadsheets are the primary method that marketers use to organize their data. However, you may use other forms of software and analytics tools in addition to your spreadsheets.
After organizing your data and getting it all to one place, your next objective is to filter and clean the data.
The goal here is to remove any errors or other problems that will conflict with the accuracy of your analysis, while also ensuring that each separate set of data can effectively “talk” to one another in the spreadsheet.
There are a few objectives at this stage. First, you’ll want to remove repeat data that may appear across different sources.
For example, you may have two datasheets tracking data. You only need one count. Otherwise, you could be double-counting clicks and skewing your analysis results.
Next, look at how data is measured across the spreadsheet. You want units and labels to be uniform. You don’t want click costs to be expressed in dollars half the time and euros the other half. You need to pick a unit and convert your data so that it all follows this format.
Finally, review all of your spreadsheet data for any other errors, like misspellings, incorrect inputs, etc. It’s also a good idea to look at your spreadsheet’s overall structure and see if data is arranged in a logical order that provides the most clarity.
Tip: Data analytics is the science of analyzing data to make conclusions about that information. However, data needs to be relevant, collected, cleaned and organized before you can reach proper conclusions.
The outlined steps above act as the framework of a typical analysis. However, several challenges can disrupt this process and stop your analysis in its tracks.
Some of these challenges were briefly mentioned in the previous section, such as problems when collecting data from external sources or confusion regarding which data is actually relevant to your analysis.
The next part of this discussion will look at specific data analytics challenges for PPC marketers and how to overcome them.
The importance of data is not lost on today’s organizations. Most businesses gobble up as much data as they can get their hands on because they understand the value of such information.
Unfortunately, gathering everything makes for an overwhelming amount of stuff that needs to be organized, filtered, cleaned and analyzed.
The volume of data produced daily is where the term “big data” comes from. Every incident or interaction between your customers and your business grows valuable data points that can be tracked, analyzed and compared.
Even a small business produces thousands of interlocking data sets in just a short span of time.
Solution: You need a data system that is capable of automatically collecting and organizing the massive scores of data that your business produces. If you had to perform this process manually, it’d be impossible with the speed and size of today’s data.
An automated system allows you to focus your time on analysis and following up with insights, instead of collection.
While contending with the tremendous volume of data being produced, a second challenge arises: identifying what’s meaningful from what isn’t. To make matters worse, this distinction has to be made in real-time.
The longer you take to dig down into the opportunities and insights buried by the data, the less valuable the information becomes.
If you can’t act quickly enough, you’ll be minimizing the potential value.
You may end up relying on outdated data to make your decisions, which can have a significantly negative impact.
Solution: Again, automation is your best friend.
If you try and manage your data manually, you’ll always be behind. Keeping pace with the real-time changes just isn’t possible. You need the power and instantaneous analysis capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
When you have a data system capable of detecting meaningful insights in real-time, you receive reports and alerts to the latest changes affecting your marketing and PPC campaigns. This allows you to stay ahead of the game.
Analyzing raw numbers alone is a challenging prospect for the human brain. The majority of people just aren’t familiar with working with giant scores of numbers. It is hard for them to extract valuable information from a spreadsheet’s wall of numbers.
You need to transform that data into something that your brain can comprehend and analyze. Data Visualization is a crucial step that will make the data and insights more accessible.
Spreadsheets tell you about your data, but PPC charts and visualizations show you, which is far more valuable. You can understand the data with just one glance.
Solution: Data needs to be visually presented to ensure that it is quickly and fully understood. This means using charts, graphs and other visualizations to display your PPC data.
You want a tool that can help translate your raw data into expressive visuals that allow you to see the big picture behind those complex spreadsheets.
Unfortunately, spreadsheet programs like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel have limited charting options. There is a complete lack of charts explicitly built for marketers and PPC managers. This is where ChartExpo steps in.
ChartExpo is an add-on that works with Excel or Google Sheets. It has multiple visualization chart libraries consisting of over 80 total options (and growing) to display your data.
ChartExpo built many of these charts with digital marketing in mind. You’ll always have multiple options designed to help you see insights right away.
As mentioned earlier, you’re going to be acquiring data from multiple sources and platforms. This creates a few different challenges.
Most obvious, it takes more time and effort to acquire data from different locations and bring them into a centralized place.
Additionally, you may have to do extensive cleaning and filtering to combine these data sets without complications. Doing this by hand can be tedious and takes time away from more important tasks.
Solution: You need to develop a centralized system. Otherwise, you and your team will always need to reach out to each individual source to collect data. A centralized system will also make it easier to cross-compare different channels and platforms.
Moving data to one centralized system is only half the battle. You also need to ensure that all of that data is accessible to the people who need it most. PPC managers and marketing analysts need access to a lot of data.
This can be difficult in a large organization where data access is highly restrictive. The challenge only increases if PPC managers or marketers work off-site because there can be additional security issues when transmitting data to remote locations.
Solution: You want access to data to be as unrestricted as possible, without compromising the security. An effective database will remedy accessibility issues, while ensuring that only authorized team members can access sensitive information.
You can easily ruin your analytics process if you let poor quality and inaccurate data enter the mix.
This is the Achilles’ heel of analytics.
If you have bad data going into the analysis, any insights or conclusions coming out the other end will be equally poor.
Low-quality data may be a simple matter of timing. Again, you don’t want to make current decisions on outdated information.
If these inaccurate or outdated insights and conclusions are used to influence decisions, it could lead to disastrous consequences.
Solution: Implementing a central data system will protect you against low-quality data. Only trusted, verified sources will be funneling data into your system. Any new information is added as soon as it is created.
Thus, you’ll never have to worry about outdated or unverified data entering your analysis.
Every marketing team faces pressure from stakeholders and upper management. People want to know what’s being done and see the results of their marketing budget.
This creates an added step in the process: reporting these results to others, which is easier said than done.
It’s important to keep in mind that, while you may be very familiar with the data and your marketing strategies’ day-to-day, your stakeholders are not as comfortable swimming in these waters.
You need to take extra care in your reports to ensure that these unfamiliar parties can be caught up to speed and reach the same conclusions from the data.
Solution: This is another challenge that you can overcome with an effective PPC charting tool, such as ChartExpo. By empowering your charts with effective visuals, you can better guarantee that stakeholders and upper management understand the information.
Stakeholders are not the only people that can be unfamiliar with data analysis. Some marketers also struggle with analytics due to a lack of experience and talent. Your team may lack the knowledge or capability to run a detailed data analysis successfully.
Having strong expertise in data science and analytics has only recently become an essential requirement of marketing staff. Many organizations treat it as a welcomed skill, but not a mandatory one.
As a result, many marketers only have a basic understanding of analytics.
Solution: There are two ways you can approach resolving this issue. The first is through your hiring process; you can look at hiring marketers with a strong competency in analytics.
This is not always possible, as hiring such a specialist can be costly. There may not be room in your payroll to hire an entirely new employee.
The alternative solution is to invest in analytics software that is incredibly easy to use. With the right PPC analytics solution, you need very little expertise yourself.
The AI system handles all of the tricky, intricate parts through machine learning algorithms. Your only job is to decide what to analyze and how to use the resulting actionable insights!
One of the recurring solutions for many of these challenges is implementing automated solutions. On paper, automation seems like a no-brainer. Yet, many marketers have their apprehensions about it.
It’s easy to feel anxious about handing over control of your data and analytics to an AI system. This can feel like you’re placing the future of your strategies and campaign performance into the hands of a machine.
This is not the case. Often, this anxiety is the result of confusion regarding what automation actually means.
The focus of automated PPC tool is not to take over control of your campaigns. Instead, they aim to remove the burden of the time-consuming, tedious tasks that often bog down marketers. The analytics process is full of these types of activities.
Solution: When choosing the right analytics software to help you improve your PPC marketing, PPC Signal is the best answer.
This system is easy to use and allows marketers to focus all of their attention on improving campaigns and making progress.
You don’t have to keep fussing with complex spreadsheets and raw data that is changing every hour.
PPC Signal monitors your campaigns and finds noteworthy changes that are worth a more in-depth look. You have complete control over which signals you choose to investigate and what actions to take next.
In case you’re unsure of what the next step is, PPC Signal also recommends a solution to each signal it presents.
Data is everywhere in marketing and PPC management. Considering the value of data and analytics, this should come as great news. However, where there is data, there are challenges.
Understanding the different examples of marketing analytics isn’t enough. You need to also recognize the challenges associated with performing each type of analysis and how to overcome them.
Most importantly, you need to know which tools are most beneficial in helping you solve these different obstacles.
PPC Signal and ChartExpo should both be at the top of your list – a one-two punch that handles both the analytics side of things (PPC Signal), as well as the reporting and visualizing of data (ChartExpo).
With these two solutions in your toolbox, you’ll have no problems conquering the real-life challenges of improving your PPC campaigns.
How much did you enjoy this article?
We will help your ad reach the right person, at the right time
Actionable insights discovered for you. Now you can do more in less time.
PPCexpo Keyword Planner will help you align your keywords with the customers’ intent.
Frequent audits will help you optimize your PPC campaign for success.
Visualizations give you the ability to instantly grasp the insights hidden in your numbers.
Experience the new revolution in reporting … click your way to insights, don’t scroll.
Calculate the number of combinations in your PPC campaign. It may surprise you.
Related articles
A landing page is a web page designed to drive specific actions. Learn the essentials of creating high-converting landing pages in our guide.
ROAS calculation can help you evaluate every PPC campaign's performance so that you know which of your campaigns are converting the best.
Discover the marketing lifecycle stages and how they shape customer relationships. You’ll understand their role in driving customer engagement and retention.
