Categories
There is a common two-part question that all PPC marketers are asked repeatedly:
“How much should I spend on my campaigns and how much will I make with Google Ads?”
It doesn’t matter if you work as an in-house marketer or work for an agency. Everyone wants to know about costs and PPC projections. Generating new customers is fantastic, but it comes down to money at the end of the day.
How do you get the most out of your budget?
Resolving cost-related problems is one of the most crucial duties of a PPC manager. You need to be adept at detecting potential risks and intervening before those issues grow into more significant problems.
This requires a keen understanding of your data, both current and historical. Then, you can predict what changes will positively or negatively impact performance.
That’s how you achieve optimal budget utilization!
In this discussion, we’ll look at what PPC managers need to know and do to enable early warning detection and intervention in their campaigns.
With the information included in this guide, you’ll be able to turn your PPC data into actionable strategies on the best ways to spend your ad budget. That means higher returns and less wasted spend! Let’s get started.
PPC early detection and early intervention are essentially the processes of using predictive data and analytics to increase your campaign ROI.
Without data-informed forecasts, you’d be left to guess the best ways to use your budget. This is far from the most optimal method of managing campaign spend!
That said, data doesn’t totally solve the problem. In fact, data has its own inherent challenges. Managing a PPC campaign is incredibly difficult because of how many metrics and factors can influence performance.
For most Google Ads users, manual management isn’t feasible because it is too complex to analyze by hand.
This is where PPC projection comes into play. Google Ads projections use real-time data to analyze the impact of specific campaign changes. Thus, you can foresee what adjustments are good and which are going to affect your campaigns negatively.
In other words, creating accurate forecasts allows you to evaluate future campaign performance. When you predict low performance or poor budget utilization, you can make necessary changes before these risks become realities.
Ultimately, PPC forecasting can reduce wasted ad spend, maximize your PPC efficiency and ensure that positive performance and growth become constant.
A solid PPC strategy requires a healthy budget. Typically, this means that you need buy-in from your clients or leadership teams.
The problem is that no one will allocate more money to a strategy unless you’re able to forecast positive results accurately. You can’t ask for more money based on guesswork!
You know that more budget will lead to more results, but it’s not enough to tell stakeholders this without evidence to back up the claim.
They need to see the numbers!
Google Ads forecasting gives you the numbers that you need to prove the value of additional spending on ads. This gives stakeholders the facts they need to decide whether or not to invest more into PPC.
If ad spend is increased by $1,000, what will be the results? How will this added investment increase conversions? What about revenue? Answering these types of questions will give management the information (and numbers) they need to assign budget appropriately.
You’ll be able to set benchmarks that demonstrate whether or not the increase in budget paid off or not. Not only will this give stakeholders confidence in your PPC strategy, but it will also help you track your progress.
New Google Ads users are sometimes under the presumption that most of the work is over once their campaign is up and running. It’s actually the opposite!
The majority of a PPC marketer’s time is not spent creating campaigns and writing new ad copy. It is spent managing existing campaigns.
As soon as a campaign is created, the marketer needs to monitor and analyze account performance for countless hours. This makes it possible to detect the small adjustments that will optimize performance. There are always ways to improve your campaigns!
This is why PPC marketers are often referred to as PPC managers.
Your PPC data is the key to knowing what to adjust and when. Your campaigns produce tons of this data every day. When you compare current data to previous periods, you begin to understand what’s working and what needs improvement.
PPC campaign projections that are based on real-time and quality data can show you:
Don’t let your account run on autopilot. PPC is not a set-and-forget strategy. You have to manage your campaigns and investigate your data to have a successful, profitable PPC strategy.
Even just a few data points can help you forecast future performance and improve your performance. However, those data points need to be verified and quality. Otherwise, your predictions may be inaccurate.
This means that PPC forecasting and predicting is harder for newer Google Ads accounts. Without historical data to rely on, it is impossible to make accurate predictions about the future of your efforts.
If you’ve already run PPC campaigns in the past, you have a wealth of valuable data that will allow you to create helpful forecasting reports.
By nature, a lot of PPC data follows fairly predictable trends. Most of your metrics will not vary dramatically day-by-day or hour-by-hour. This means that PPC data is ideal for building predictive models.
Accurate campaign detection relies on the manager’s ability to curate and store data on past campaign performance, including how each change or adjustment impacted performance.
For Google Ads users that do not have a long account history or enough data to feed their forecasting, you may be able to rely on your competitors’ campaigns to fill in the blanks.
Even if you have an expansive account history, competitor data is still a valuable source for building an accurate predictive system. Remember, your PPC campaigns are influenced by what competitors are doing!
Forecasting aside, it’s always helpful to know what competitors are doing and how their campaigns stack up against yours. This allows you to counter-strategize and navigate the competitive landscape more effectively.
How do you access competitor data? The Auction Insights report in Google Ads is a great resource. Auction Insights will show you competitor bids and rankings. You’ll be able to see other interesting insights, such as:
The primary reason for using Google Auction Insights is to understand how aggressive your competitors are in auctions. You’ll begin to see patterns in their strategies that will help you better align your own efforts in the market.
You should aim to look at Auction Insights routinely. In doing so, you’ll see how different hours of the day or days of the week affect competitor activity. This could give you the clues you need to schedule your ads and bids more efficiently.
As you begin developing your forecasts, you’ll undoubtedly run into some obstacles. Forecasting in paid search is not easy and it can quickly become a stressful process for several reasons:
The other factors to pay attention to are the major trends and technologies that affect all PPC marketing. For instance, AI, automation and voice search are significant players right now.
These types of shifts and anomalies can radically change the entire PPC landscape, which may turn any predictions you have upside down.
You should also pay attention to trends that are specific to your industry. These can also impact consumer behaviors, which then affects your PPC campaigns.
As a PPC manager, you have to consider every possible factor that could positively or negatively affect your performance. It’s a busy job!
Automation is one of the major buzzwords in the PPC world right now – and for a good reason. Through automation, you can remove a lot of the stress and challenges associated with PPC management.
This is especially true when you are operating a large account. With all of the metrics that need to be considered (CTR, CPC, conversions, conversion rate, clicks, impressions, etc.), it’s almost impossible to make sense of all of this data by hand.
Even comparing simple data sets can be a challenge because you need to track changes continuously.
Automation allows you to effortlessly manage multiple campaigns at the same time. It will dig into your PPC account and discover specific areas where you need to pay more attention.
You can save massive amounts of time with automation. You no longer have to monitor and analyze your data manually; the AI system does it for you.
All you need to do is pay attention to the most notable trends and patterns that it identifies. Then, you make strategic, creative decisions based on the data.
Not only does automation save time and improve efficiency, but it also leads to fewer mistakes. When you’re working with a large amount of data, it’s easy to make errors or jump to inaccurate conclusions.
While this can still happen even with sophisticated AI, machines make far fewer errors than humans. Algorithms don’t overlook anything or make mistakes inputting data.
Few tools understand the challenges and pain points of managing a PPC campaign better than PPC Signal. When choosing an automated PPC management tool, this is one of the best options available to marketers.
PPC Signal analyzes past and present data to detect interesting trends, shifts, outliers and other fluctuations that need more attention.
Every noteworthy change that PPC Signal detects is made available in the tool’s intuitive dashboard. Each signal includes all of the relevant data that you need to understand the change and decide how best to proceed.
You can filter the currently active signals to find the ones that are most relevant to your goals and needs.
This level of automation ensures that you always stay ahead of your data, especially when it impacts your budget.
For instance, let’s say that your clicks are dropping significantly over the last 10 days. Without an automated tool like PPC Signal monitoring your campaigns 24/7, you may not catch this trend until day 8 or 9. Worse yet, you may not detect it at all!
With automation, on the other hand, you detect the change early. This gives you more than enough time to diagnose why clicks are dropping and make the necessary changes to correct the issue.
When the change in question has to do with your costs, speed is everything.
Instead of clicks, what if your CPC values were climbing significantly? Suddenly, you’re spending 300% more for each click. That’s going to drain your budget rapidly and may waste ad spend.
If you don’t have a tool like PPC Signal to detect this change early, each day could be costing you hundreds! You want to intervene early and mitigate the possible damage.
There is an old saying that says you should strive to work smarter, not harder. PPC Signal gives marketers the chance to do just that.
The algorithms behind PPC Signal will allow you to identify risks and opportunities early and make adjustments to maximize your PPC ROI. That’s working smarter!
Here are some of the other advantages of using PPC Signal over other Google Ads management tools.
PPC campaigns create tons of data. How do you know where to start looking for actionable insights to improve your efforts?
One of the challenges facing marketers is knowing what data actually matters and filtering out the rest of the stuff that matters less.
PPC Signal achieves this in several ways. First, the system sifts through all of your data and only alerts you when a change is significant enough to require extra attention. Thus, you won’t be wasting your time on unverified insights or trends.
Second, you can filter your signals, so you’re only focusing on the alerts that matter to your marketing goals. The filtering options include:
This gives you complete freedom in how to approach improving your PPC strategy. You can work campaign to campaign, or start with risks before you resolve any opportunities. Maybe you want to focus on mobile signals before the desktop ones?
PPC Signal’s filtering options make it all possible.
You should never be guessing at how to spend your ad budget. Nor should you have to because you have all of this data!
With PPC Signal automatically converting your real-time data into usable insights, you can develop a decision-making model based on evidence and numbers. This will replace the inaccurate guesswork that you’ve relied on in the past.
Decision-making is a crucial part of being a PPC manager. You’re under constant pressure to make the right moves to optimize your ads to the best of your ability. However, making all of these decisions quickly and accurately is not easy.
PPC decision-making can be outright tiring.
By removing the guesswork and injecting data and automation into the process, it becomes a lot less tedious.
Most of this discussion has focused on budgeting and how automation can make you optimize your spending.
That’s an advantage that shouldn’t be overlooked. If you can generate more results with less money, then you’re guaranteed to produce higher returns.
That said, money isn’t the only resource you want to allocate correctly. Time is another critical and limited resource. If you aren’t thinking about how you spend your time each day, you may not be making the most of it.
By automating the more tedious parts of PPC management, you free up time that can be spent on more critical tasks.
This is one of the best benefits of AI. It’s like adding a new member to the team that never stops working!
PPC Signal is an always-on monitoring system that gives you the earliest warning signs when something isn’t quite right.
You can spend all of your time enacting positive changes, instead of determining what those changes might be.
PPC Signal doesn’t just help you spend your time wisely; it turns time into a competitive advantage.
When you have automated Google Ads forecasting on your side, you can be the first to recognize and capitalize on opportunities. This allows you to extract the most amount of value from every emerging trend or shift.
Similarly, you’ll be able to mitigate risks before they grow into more significant problems.
Moreover, the PPC Signal system is built around the idea of persistent improvement. As long as you have active signals, you have ways to improve your campaigns.
This enables users to always be moving their campaigns in a positive direction. When you’re able to make forward progress a daily occurrence, you begin to stack an unbeatable advantage over the competition.
Improvement doesn’t just add incrementally. It grows exponentially over time. The longer you’re able to consistently increase performance, the greater your accumulated advantage becomes.
This advantage can’t be overcome by a competitor throwing more money at their campaigns. It takes time to overcome!
Automation and PPC campaign projections help you stay ahead of impending trends and changes. When you can accurately predict what’s around the corner, you can plan ahead and strategize accordingly.
However, there is no crystal ball telling you what’s next. You have to rely on your data for the answers. Data is an essential tool in Google Ads forecasting and intervention.
For PPC marketers, data is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is readily available and holds enormous potential value. It can tell you everything you need to know regarding how to improve your campaigns.
The other edge of the sword represents the endless struggle to keep up with the vast amounts of data being created at all times.
To overcome these challenges, PPC managers need to rely on automation and AI solutions.
PPC Signal and other automation tools allow you to focus your time and budget on the areas that offer the most value.
You can make optimization adjustments based on real-time data, without having to monitor your campaigns manually.
This keeps you on the cutting edge of your industry and steps ahead of the competition!
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.
