Google Ads Management with Early Warning System for Optimized Budget Utilization

Google Ads management require you not only creating a campaign and let it run and then then forget. It requires from you your time and expertise to decide your campaign budget, your targeting, strategies to meet your expected ROI and much more.

Seeing into the future is a superpower reserved for comic book heroes and other fantastical storybook characters. Yet, managing and optimizing a Google Ads account successfully requires a near-superhuman level of foresight.

With an unending stream of changes occurring across your account, there are plenty of opportunities to be had, but also some risks. When these risks go undetected, it can create havoc in your campaigns and cause you to mismanage and even waste your budget.

How Google Ads Management works?

Creating accounts in Google Ads and giving rights is not enough, you need to manage your ads like a professional. Having proper strutting in your account, campaigns, proper use of ad groups with relevant keywords, even selecting keywords with proper search volumes and putting them in negative list where required, knowing the unexpected and even best scenarios in your campaigns, regular monitoring and continuous improvement in your campaigns are all part of Google Ads management. You can’t just set and forget the campaigns. It require proper nourishing and you can give it only if you understand the processes completely.

Similarly, failing to capitalize on valuable opportunities in the PPC market can also be seen as negative. Opportunities missed are opportunities lost. In other words, when you fail to capitalize on a winning opportunity, you’ve missed out on the potential value, thereby slowing down the growth timeline of your advertising efforts.

How To Check Current Ad Performance?

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Cost
• Conversions
• Click-through rate (CTR)

But these are not only metrics you need to look at.  There is more prospect available. You should not miss that. The opportunities you miss are opportunities gained by your competitors!

The opportunities you miss are opportunities gained by your competitors!

To avoid such problems, you need a Google Ads management tool with an early warning system that identifies significant risks and valuable opportunities in your account. This allows you to make corrective changes before looming risks evolve into larger crises or opportunities begin to lose their value.

In this discussion, you’ll learn about the benefits of having an early warning system for your Google Ads account and how such a system can dramatically reduce wasted spend, lower cost-per-click amounts and improve performance across your PPC campaigns.

Part 1: What Is A Google Ads Early Warning System? How Is It Used?

The purpose of an early warning system for your PPC account is simple: alert and provide signal to you and your team of unusual events and trends so that you can act in a timely manner. These events or shifts can be positive or negative.

Essentially, the goal of an early warning system is to identify and analyze these events as early as possible. Ideally, the system tries to recognize an unexpected behavior in the data before it even happens.

By catching the event in the earliest stages, you have more time to adjust and plan the best course of action. This planning and preparation allows positive gains to be maximized, while the effects of negative shifts, such as budget loss and wasted spending, are minimized.

This process of min-maxing is at the core of PPC optimization!

Examples Of Early Warning Signals In Action

To further explain how a Google Ads early warning system works, here are a few examples of changes to a PPC account and how early action produces better and more consistent results to performance.

Ex 1: Accidental Overspending

You’re an online retailer of gardening supplies. The keyword “new spade shovel” has a CPC bid of $1. With this bid, you are receiving 100% of the Search Top Impression Share and Absolute Top Impression Share.

While that seems great on the surface, it could be causing you to overspend.

The problem is that as time goes on and your impressions increase, costs start to go up. You may be sinking far too much into this one keyword than expected. Plus, decreasing your CPC will cause only a moderate dip in top impression share.

When alerted to this trend by your early warning system, you decide to decrease your bid to $0.90 after four days. Then, you lower your bid again to $0.80 on day 10. These small adjustments allow you to save hundreds each day and thousands by the end of the month!

Ex 2: Rising CPC

Alternatively, let’s say the same keyword, “new spade shovel” has a CPC bid of $1 to start the month. However, increased competition and popularity for the term causes that CPC to start to increase.

This increase is slow at first and almost unnoticeable without an early warning system. But, it starts to grow and eventually your CPC is increasing by $0.15 every day. That’s not good because it means that your $1 bid would grow to $4 a click in just 20 days. You used to spend $100 for 100 clicks; now you’re going to be paying $400!

By catching this negative trend early, you can get out of Dodge City before that rising CPC amount becomes too expensive. Catching it on the fourth or fifth day gives you plenty of time to pause that particular keyword and save your account thousands.

You always need to know what’s going on with your campaigns, even down the individual keywords. The real advantage of an early warning system is having this information early on, when it is still very actionable.

This level of constant monitoring and trend detection requires an extremely sophisticated tool that is capable of thorough and deep analysis.

A great Google Ads management tool would analyze the data and perform the task of bringing to the surface the key, actionable insights that you need. Thus, you would never have to sift through the pie of insights yourself to determine what’s valuable and what isn’t.

Part 2: The Difficulties Of Campaign Management

Campaign Management Takes Lots Of Time

Campaign management requires consistent focus, constant attention, skills, an analytical mindset and extreme attention to details. The work starts well before you launch your first campaign and continues forever.

The list of management tasks is long and includes setting aside budget, optimizing spending, assigning resources, perfecting audience targeting, developing and testing new ad copy, strengthening offers, optimizing landing pages, researching keywords and many other responsibilities.

The simple truth is that you’re only capable of some of these. Time is a crucial reason why managers often feel stressed. There is just not enough time in the day to handle every aspect of your campaigns on your own.

As a result, your optimization efforts are responding to changes that have already happened, instead of proactively adjusting to what’s about to occur.

Again, the sooner you identify and actively correct for opportunities and risks, the more fruitful these actions become. If you delay capitalizing on an opportunity, its value begins to lessen. Buying stocks in Apple is still a fruitful endeavor, but not as much as if you had invested 20 years ago.

The same is true of risks. A small drip in a pipe isn’t difficult to fix. But, the longer you wait, the more damage those drips will cause. Before long, you need to fix the pipe and repair the ceiling from water damage.

You need to patch the holes in your PPC campaigns sooner, rather than later.

While you may wince at the thought of handing over key tasks to a Google Ads management tool or early warning system, it takes a lot of the tedium and workload off your plate. You can allocate this time to more important tasks that do require a 100% human approach.

It’s not about giving up control of your campaign management. Instead, it’s about optimizing your time correctly to produce the very best results possible.

Campaign Management Requires Inhuman Brainpower

Time is not the only pressure of managing your Google Ads account. You also have to overcome complexity. Managing a successful PPC account requires you to have…:

• A deep understanding of your business and the industry.
• A finger on the pulse of emerging trends and changes affecting Google Ads.
• An extremely high level of expertise in data science and analytics.
• A firm grasp on the latest technologies and behaviors shaping marketing.
• A progressive, long-term view on business development.

It is impossible to find a manager that embodies all of these at a high level. If you task a single person with the job, it’ll be a failure from the beginning. That’s why campaign management is such a difficult task that often requires assistance.

There are a few reasons behind the complexity of PPC marketing. The first obstacle is that the competitive landscape surrounding your PPC campaigns is always shifting and changing. You have to take into account the following:

• New ways that target audiences are searching and interacting with marketing messages.
• Updates, policy changes and new features being added to the Google Ads platform.
• Changes to competitor PPC strategies that may be affecting your own efforts.
• Changes to your PPC strategies that may be affecting other campaigns in your account.
• External factors that spill over into the PPC market, such as rapid shifts in technology.

Identifying and tracking these changes is a full-time responsibility that requires constant monitoring. And that doesn’t even include the effort and resources it takes to actually analyze these changes and strategize accordingly.

The second reason that campaign management is so complex is the sheer volume of data involved in the process. It’s fine to manage a single campaign with only three ad groups and five keywords for each group. You can monitor everything in a single spreadsheet.

However, what happens when your Google Ads account grows larger? What happens when you’re simultaneously managing hundreds of campaigns and thousands of keywords? Suddenly, a hundred rows of data becomes hundreds of thousands of rows.

Even if you have a deeply analytical mindset and are great with numbers, the size of the data is impossible to manage on your own. Google Ads management tools do the heavy-lifting in this area. This leaves you with the responsibility of applying your expertise and knowledge as a PPC marketer to choose which insights are most valuable to your organization.

Too Many Tools For Google Ads Management And Monitoring

There are hundreds of tools on the market all claiming to help you better manage and optimize your campaigns in some way. There are tools specifically designed to help you select better keywords or build and optimize landing pages. There are also tools that help you produce the best targeting and campaign settings configurations to achieve optimal results. The list of tools and options goes on.

All of these tools are aimed at making your life as a PPC manager easier. It isn’t just about automating certain steps to shrink your marketing to-do list; it’s about allowing you to be more efficient as a marketer and optimizing how you spend your time.

However, there are some downsides to the abundance of tools available to marketers:

• Option Paralysis: With so many tools to choose from, it can be extremely hard to find the options that suit your business the best. Even if you need a tool with a very specific function, there are undoubtedly a handful of software solutions available.

You really need to spend a lot of time exploring the different tools and features to find the ones that best resolve the unique obstacles facing your organization. Take advantage of free trials, demos and other resources until you find the right fit.

Remember, just because a Google Ads management tool is “the favorite amongst Fortune 500 companies,” doesn’t mean that it will be the favorite for your company. Choose solutions that make sense for your organization!

• Tool Overload: Similar to option paralysis, you can also find yourself in a situation of tool overload. This happens because so many Google Ads management solutions are very specific in their design.

You can easily find yourself with 5+ niche tools all designed for a different area of campaign management. For instance, one tool for keyword research, another for landing page optimization, a third and fourth for metric analysis and so on.

Not only does it take time to learn and master all of these tools, but you also have to be certain that your tools can “talk” with one another. Otherwise, you’ll have to work in multiple environments simultaneously.

• Capability: Of course, not all tools are created the same. There are some Google Ads management solutions that are more sophisticated than others. This is very common with solutions that promise to provide marketers with so called insights.

Insights are also not all built the same.

When a tool bombards you with lots of insights, it’s not always a good thing. The first problem is you need to separate what you already know from what’s new information. Then, you have to analyze the unknowns for value. Are these insights actually worth your time and attention?

Even if you do manage to scrape some useful insights from the bunch, the time that this process takes means that you’ve lost the opportunity or failed to mitigate the risk.

In essence, a Google Ads management tool needs to not only provide insights, but also ensure that the information is valuable, actionable and presented at the right time.

Stop wasting your time digging through last month’s insights today.

• Misleading Functions And Features: This is very common with certain tools that claim to be a Google Ads management and monitoring solution for your campaigns. In reality, these tools are simple campaign configuration services.

What’s the difference? A campaign configuration tool looks specifically at your settings. The tool starts by analyzing audience targeting, budget and other options. Then, it begins exploring different configurations of these settings until it reaches what it feels is the best setup.

It’s a helpful tool, as configuration is definitely an important part, but this is not campaign management or monitoring. These duties happen during and after execution, when the campaign is already running.

The key takeaway is to know what tools you actually need and steer clear of solutions that claim to be more than they actually are.

Campaign Analysis Is A Tough Job, Even For A Machine

Campaign analysis is incredibly complex. This concept was introduced in an earlier section but warrants repeating. You’re dealing with an almost unfathomable amount of data, which is changing all the time. Not to mention, the diversity of analysis tasks required and the frequency of these projects needed is a giant undertaking.

It’s impossible for a manager, or team of managers, to handle on their own. It’s also impossible for many general campaign configuration and management tools to cope with as well.

What you need is a powerful tool that is specialized in managing large data sets and analyzing incoming data instantly. This speed and capability means that you’ll have up-to-date insights at all times.

These tools are not a rarity and there are many sophisticated Google Ads management solutions that are capable of deep analysis and uncovering insights. Where many of these tools go wrong, however, is when it comes to filtering the information?

Again, not all insights are built the same. When marketers say, “I want more insights regarding my Google Ads campaigns,” what they are actually after is more actionable insights.

Thus, there is a need for a tool that is reliable, capable of handling large data sets, offers campaign configuration auditing, extracts insights and filters those insights so that you only receive the most valuable and actionable details.

What Does Such A Tool Look Like?

What exactly does a tool that extracts and filters insights actually look like? And, what is an actionable, valuable insight? Is there really a difference?

A typical campaign management tool returns a lot of relatively baseline insights. These are insights that include base dimensions and metrics from the platform. It is not much deeper than the charts and analysis options already offered by the Google Ads service.

This leaves much of the actual analysis still in your hands. You need to look at the data, understand what’s being conveyed and whether there is any significance worth investigating further. Again, this makes timing your enemy.

A superior Google Ads management tool is one that turns time into an advantage by providing rigorous and continuous auditing of your account and campaigns and offering observations of noteworthy and significant deviations of data behaviors. In other words, a tool that signals you to the most important changes in your campaigns.

This tool should also offer some guidance on the best course of action to take. This further improves your efficiency because you don’t need to spend time analyzing the insight yourself. That part of the process has already been taken care of.

You should think of the best Google Ads management tool like your favorite weather app. The app doesn’t let you know every time a small change in temperature happens. That would be too overwhelming. It also doesn’t let you know of significant weather events after they’ve already happened because that would defeat the purpose.

What a weather app does is continuously monitor the weather data and notify you when there are significant, severe changes in forecasting that you need to prepare for. These notifications occur well before the weather shifts, giving you ample time to prepare.

That’s what you should expect from a PPC management tool!

Part 3: PPC Signal — Campaign Management Made Easy

The PPCexpo team has always been dedicated to making data and analytics more useful to the marketing world. In pursuit of this goal, our team of engineers developed a tool to help you make better decisions with your PPC accounts. It’s not about providing insights; it’s about providing guidance on how to make positive change a daily occurrence for your campaigns.

Why PPC Signal?

There are four key reasons why PPC Signal is the best tool to have when it comes to Google Ads management.

Exhaustive Analysis, But Focused Insights

Digging deep and uncovering insights is a powerful feature in its own right, but it isn’t a feature exclusive to PPC Signal. There are many solutions that perform deep analysis and look at every possible combination of metrics and dimensions.

The difference is that PPC Signal exhaustively analyzes every angle, but then only provides insights focused on your success. This improves your efficiency at correcting negative behaviors and capitalizing on positive ones. It also means that your decisions will be guided by real value, instead of anomalous spikes or other data inaccuracies.

Driven By Insights, Instead Of Driven By Data

By focusing on actionable insights, PPC Signal is an insight-driven tool, rather than a data-driven one. The majority of Google Ads management solutions are the latter, which again means that the job is only half finished. The responsibility of analyzing each insight and determining their valuable still falls on you.

PPC Signal only returns the insights that matter. Then, the system recommends changes on how to best approach each signal. This means that you can focus all of your time and energy on assessing and improving the current state of your campaigns.

It’s about tapping into what’s actually going on at the moment and acting on the latest trends. It’s these trends that can help reduce wasted spend and boost your revenue and campaign ROI.

Time Really Is Gold

Once again, it comes down to timing. When you have a campaign management tool that is driven by insights, instead of data, you won’t just be eliminating wasted spending, but also wasted time.

By allowing PPC Signal to not only perform the analysis of your PPC data, but also extract insights and offer suggestions on the best course of action, you suddenly find yourself with a lot more time on your hands to actually enact changes and make positive progress a daily occurrence.

That’s not all. PPC Signal also identifies opportunities and risks well before they’ve materialized into bonafide trends. This makes PPC Signal an excellent early warning system that will alleviate the burden on you and your team of having to worry about changes occurring in your campaigns that you haven’t yet identified.

With PPC Signal, you can practically see around corners!

Marketing Funnel View

The marketing funnel is a common concept that marketers have used and understood long before there was ever the word “digital” attached to their title. PPC Signal uses this same age-old concept and allows you to optimize your funnel any way you see fit.

Let’s quickly recap what a typical marketing funnel looks like. It starts with awareness; you need customers to know your brand before they are willing to buy your products or enlist your services. Next comes research and consideration. In these stages, customers are comparing your offerings with competitors and deciding whether or not they really need your product.

Finally, there is the conversion or action stage, where customers have made up their mind and made the decision to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

There are different PPC metrics that fit into each marketing funnel stage. For instance, impressions are desirable at the early stages of the funnel, while conversions are suited towards the end of the funnel.

That said, this is a typical marketing funnel. Your business may use a different model. Luckily, PPC Signal allows you to map your metrics to attune to your unique marketing funnel.

By allowing you to define your own funnel and shifting metrics the way you see fit, you can better optimize insights to fit your business. You can even select or unselect certain metrics, thereby only seeing the results that matter most.

PPC Signal Conquers Complexity With Simplicity

There are plenty of PPC marketing tools out there that provide awesome looking dashboards and graphics. Yet, these tools fail to deliver like a baseball player that can only hit a fastball. Once the data starts pitching splitters, curveballs, sliders and knuckleballs, these tools can’t produce results.

While these tools may have attractive interfaces and provide all manner of features and tools, what you really need is results. You need a tool that will go all the way to the Big Leagues. You need a tool that is capable of handling your most complex PPC marketing data and returning valuable, actionable insights.

Imagine if you have 864,000 unique combinations between your campaign metrics and dimensions. That’s a fairly small-to-medium sized account to manage. Yet, to handle those combinations by hand would take months.

PPC Signal continues to swat insight-driven home runs, even when your campaigns grow well beyond this mark of 86K combinations. How? Even though the PPC Signal system will analyze all of your PPC metrics, it will only present insights based on what you’ve designated to be important.

Thus, you can stop being bombarded by metrics and insights that don’t fit the mold of your marketing objectives. Instead, the PPC Signal will provide daily alerts about how to positively change your campaigns.

It’s about taking the complex and offering a simple solution. Simple can sometimes be misconstrued as basic. That’s far from the case with PPC Signal. The philosophy behind this tool is to try and improve your campaigns by just 1% each day.

With continuous and rigorous monitoring of campaign data and a thorough stream of insights on how to capitalize on current opportunities and avoid the latest risks, this 1% daily improvement benchmark is easy to obtain.

All you need to do is follow a few PPC Signal alerts each day and you’ll unlock that 1% advantage. Seems like a drop in the bucket, right? Well, over time, those 1% daily improvements quickly begin to multiply and compound on one another.

This means that after a year of daily +1% changes, your overall growth is not 365%, but 3,778%. That’s a grand slam.

Part 4: How To Use The PPC Signal System

In this section, you’ll learn how the PPC Signal tool actually works. Specifically, how it can be used to unlock these daily 1% improvement opportunities. Let’s dig into the PPC Signal system and find out how this Google Ads management tool works.

Summary View

This is where you can see a “bird’s eye view” of your Google Ads account. You’ll find the total number of “active” alerts. In other words, how many observations you have yet to explore. You will also see any observations you have bookmarked, as well as those that you’ve already taken action on.

This is a great screen to get right into the action. If you’re trying to complete a 1% daily improvement, this dashboard will show you where you left off yesterday (bookmarked observations) and what’s still left to explore (active observations).

Filters

Have a lot of active signals and need to narrow down the list? This is where PPC Signal stands out from the crowd of other Google Ads management solutions. There are several filters in the PPC Signal tool:

• Filter by campaign: When you choose to filter your observations by campaign, you’ll see a list of all of the ongoing campaigns in your Google Ads account. Then, you can choose which individual campaigns you want to see insights for.

Here’s an example:

• Filter by ad group: Want to go one step lower? The ad groups filter option will allow you to take the selected campaign and filter in further by ad groups. If you have all campaigns selected, then all of your ad groups will appear and you can select/deselect the ones relevant to your analysis.
  
• Filter by keywords: One step below the ad-group level is keywords. Again, you can choose to look at keywords by a single campaign or ad group, or leave all of these options selected and filter by individual keywords.
  
• Filter by device type: When it comes to device type, you have five options: Desktop, Mobile, Tablet Smart TV or All. Your campaigns perform differently based on these various device types. This is an important dimension when exploring the performance of your Google Ads account.
  
• Filter by location: The “Geo” option in PPC Signal allows you to filter insights by location. This is ideal for local campaigns that have very specific location targets. However, it is also great for global campaigns that want to see how their messages appear across very culturally diverse audiences.
  
• Filter by hour of day (HoD): Ad scheduling is an important component to PPC marketing. It determines when your ads are shown based on when audiences are most active. With PPC Signal, you can filter your insights by every hour of the day.
  
• Filter by metrics: There is a long list of metrics that are all important factors in the success of your campaigns. PPC Signal allows you to filter by all of the typical Google Ads metrics (clicks, conversions, impressions, ROAS, impression share, CPC and so on).

You can also filter by system derived metrics. These are moving averages that PPC Signal uses to identify related dimensions and other relationships in your data.

Metrics are separated by funnel position (top funnel, middle funnel and bottom funnel).

• Filter by signal quality: PPC Signal is one of the only Google Ads management tools out there that allows you to filter insights directly by value. The signal quality filter looks at how significant the observation is.

For instance, if impressions suddenly jumped by 2%, the signal quality may be considered “Good.” Meanwhile, an impression change of 10% would be rated as “Better” or even “Best.”

By filtering your results by only the “Best” signals, you can see the most valuable insights out of all of PPC Signal’s observations.

• Filter by signal type: In this guide, the concepts of opportunities and risks have been discussed to the fullest. When you capitalize on an opportunity, you create positive growth for your campaign. Similarly, when you mitigate a risk, you avoid a negative dip in performance for the campaign.

You can also look at information insights, which are neither positive nor negative. They are neutral changes meant to inform you.

By applying the right combination of these filters, you can find the signals/observations with the most value to your organization.

Views

There are multiple different ways that you can view the observations witnessed by PPC Signal. Again, these different options allow you to focus on the insights that best suit the needs of your business. This allows you to cut through the noise and focus on the details that really matter.

The different views provided by PPC Signal allow you to have a complete 360-degree view of your account and approach insights from any angle.

• Listing: The first view you’ll find is a simple list of every observation in the applied filter. You can click the tabs at the top of this screen to change the view to different levels (campaign, ad group, keyword, device, etc.). Next to each item is the number of observations in that category.
  
• Summary view: When you click on one of the list items, it expands to include a short summary of all of the observations included in the selected group. This summary view includes a short description of the signal, along with a simple chart so you can visually see the trend.

Beneath the description are the different categories that are affected by the observation. This allows you to get right to the source of the problem or opportunity.

It’s also worth noting that certain key elements in the text description are highlighted as either green or red. Green text reflects an opportunity and red text is used to present risks.

• Detailed View: When you click the “Explore” option under one of the summaries, you get a detailed view of the observation. The chart visualization expands allowing you to have a more complete view of the observation.

You can click different metrics to add or remove them to the chart. This means you can see how the observation affects your key performance indicators.

Actions

As mentioned. PPC Signal does not just present insights and observations. It also offers recommendations on how to resolve each alert. In this section, you’ll see what actions are available in the PPC system and how they can be applied to your Google Ads campaigns.

• Campaign Level Actions: As the highest view level, campaign actions are the most impactful. You can choose to pause or enable a campaign right from the PPC Signal tool. Alternatively, you can choose to change the budget for the selected campaign.
  
• Ad Group Signals: At the ad group level, you have the same action options. You can select to change the status of an ad group (enabled or paused). And, you can increase or decrease the budget for the ad group.
  
• Keyword Actions: When you move down to the keyword level, your action options change slightly. You can still take action by pausing or enabling the selected keyword. However, instead of altering your budget, you can only change your Max CPC amount for the keyword.
  
• Device Level Actions: For devices, your options are to increase or decrease the bid amount by a certain percentage. You need to first select a device type (Desktop, tablet, mobile, etc.) before applying an action.
  
• Geo Level Actions: For every geographical location that your campaigns are targeting, you have the option to adjust bids by a certain percentage. To make matters easier, you can search specific locations.
  
• HoD Level Actions: Similar to the Geo Level Actions, this option will display all of your current hour-of-day bids. Then, you can choose to adjust bids for any hour/day by a certain percentage. To find a specific day or time, you can use the search function.
  

FAQs:

How much to charge for Google Ads Management?

It depends and vary from client to client and based on your services experiences as well. You can charge upto 1500 USD per month for single Google Ads campaign management.  If you have multiple third party tools and reporting system then you can charge differently by showing the value addition to your clients.

What is Google Ads Management services?

Google Ads management services must comply as managing campaigns within defined budget with least wasted spend and maximum ROI gain by targeting the right audience on the basis of right strategies.

Wrap Up

Today’s Google Ads management tools are not all that they appear to be. Most tools provide campaign configuration management and allow users to work from a single view. But, behind these fancy dashboards and features is a glaring lack of what PPC marketers actually need from a campaign management solution.

You need a solution capable of handling the very complex and ever-changing nature of your Google Ads account data. And, you need that system to work continuously and swiftly to return actionable insights at the right time.

PPC Signal is the best Google Ads management solution because it saves you time and offers a simple solution to the incredibly complicated task of handling account changes and improving your campaigns.