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Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is by no means an easy part of the digital marketing strategy. It involves many moving parts that all need to be adequately tracked, analyzed and optimized.
Plus, PPC has a direct paid element, which means mistakes in this area can cost you.
To try and stay on top of their PPC campaigns, many marketers use a Google Ads tool.
These marketing solutions come in many shapes and sizes, but they all share the same goal: make the life of a PPC account easier.
Each Google Ads tool achieves this goal to some degree, but some more than others. Ideally, you want to choose the one with the most value to offer. This is the tool that will provide the most help and relief to you as a PPC manager.
This discussion will evaluate why PPC marketers need these tools, what they bring to the game and how to select the best one for your needs.
Let’s dive in.
People often think of complexities as a problem. This thinking is not unjustified. If you can’t manage complexity, it’s like a monster that repeatedly blocks your way.
However, complex things are not always bad. Plain and simple food may be easy to make and stomach, but complex dishes elevate tastes and make us want more.
If you can manage to add the right ingredients and manage the complexity of the meal you’re making, then the outcome is far superior.
The same is true of complexity in PPC marketing.
You have to start viewing the complicated mess of your campaigns not as a problem to be eliminated, but as a challenging opportunity that you can use to your advantage.
When you exploit complexity in the right way, you can unlock a powerful competitive advantage.
Complexity can have many levels; it all depends on the number of interconnections that exist. The various moving parts that live in your Google Ads campaigns are the types of interconnections that produce complexity.
The larger your account, the more interconnections there are.
The same is true of your business. A small company, with only one or two stakeholders, limited employees and a small customer base will have fewer complex connections than a large enterprise.
This is another reason why complexity shouldn’t be feared or avoided. It can be a sign that your business is growing!
Before you begin managing and capitalizing on the complexity of your PPC strategy, you need to know just how complex your account is.
The Combinations Calculator is a free tool that measures how many interconnections exist in your Google Ads account.
It looks at the number of campaigns, ad groups, keywords, locations, metrics, devices and more that you are tracking. Then, it calculates the total number of possible combinations between your metrics and data dimensions.
Marketing isn’t as simple as plastering a few ads and waiting for the results to roll in. It requires careful planning, research, creativity, luck and a lot of classic trial and error.
This is especially true for digital channels, such as social media platforms, search ads, SEO and other strategies. Internet users are constantly bombarded with all types of media.
So, getting your messages and content to stand out from all the noise is both an art and a science.
You need an incredibly deep sense of your customer, market, competitors and more. Plus, you need to know yourself as a business. What’s your best selling point? What’s the persona that you want to deliver to customers?
There are thousands of questions that a business must ask in the pursuit of creating a marketing strategy.
Some of the answers will be guesswork at first. Over time, you’ll incorporate data and refine these parts of your strategy based on what works the best – trial and error.
Thus, you not only have to deal with the complexity of the marketing process, but you’ll also have to stomach a lot of failures and bumps in the road along the way.
Data is your best friend in marketing. It is your greatest asset when transitioning away from strategies based on opinions and guesses.
Data provides concrete evidence about what’s working, what isn’t and to what degree. You can use it to identify your best and worst strategies and where your time and attention are needed most.
It’s an incredibly valuable commodity that your business produces constantly. Every interaction that a customer has with your marketing efforts produces data. Even non-interactions hold usable information about what isn’t working well.
However, this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have access to mountains of free information about your customers, competitors, markets, etc.
The other side is the complexity of data. Having tons of data available may seem like a benefit, but it can quickly become overwhelming.
You have to sift through heaps of less valuable information to find sound data that will help improve your strategies.
This is a constant, tedious process that requires strong statistical expertise. You have to monitor your data and analyze changes to uncover actionable insights.
Plus, your campaigns create more data every day, which only adds to the frustration. You have to move quickly to maximize the value of your data.
As a result, many companies even hire a specialized data scientist to help make sense of it all.
For large companies with robust marketing strategies, the mountains of data are so immense that managing these data obstacles is an impossibility without the help of machine learning algorithms.
These sophisticated programs automatically track and analyze marketing data in real-time. This takes immense pressure and workload off the shoulders of the marketer.
Is it worth it to suffer through all these headaches and obstacles of complex data? Absolutely!
When you can successfully manage marketing complexity, there are three huge benefits.
You can test the value of any marketing strategy based on its returns. ROI is a relatively simple measure of what you invest versus what you get as a result.
Hidden within your data are valuable opportunities that can increase your returns.
If you can navigate the complex nature of your data and locate these occurrences, you can stack big wins.
Competitors that aren’t able to turn their data into an advantage will miss these opportunities entirely.
Some marketers try to avoid investing in a Google Ads tool to help with their data because they fear the initial costs.
This apprehension costs them in the long run because the proper Google Ads solution will dramatically lower your PPC costs.
Along with detecting winning opportunities in your complex data, you can also discover potential risks that threaten to damage your performance.
Often in PPC, these risks are areas in your campaigns where you’re overpaying for keywords that aren’t providing good results.
If you’re able to detect and mitigate these risks early, you can reduce your wasted spending. This budget-saving strategy will give you more money to funnel into other opportunities that produce substantial returns.
Reducing costs and improving returns – who could say no to that?
Knowing your customers is one of the cornerstones of successful marketing. The more intel you have on your audience, the easier it is to target them with the right strategies.
Customers enjoy it too because they are shown more relevant products, messages, offers, etc.
Audience insights allow you to listen closely to customer needs and make swift adjustments to your products and strategies.
Customers will feel that their thoughts and feelings are heard and make a difference, which further stimulates that awesome experience to keep them coming back for future business.
Essentially, knowing the complexities of your data will eventually impact your customers as well.
Your decisions drive your marketing strategies. If you make the right decisions, at the correct times, your campaigns prosper and grow steadily.
Conversely, poor decision-making causes your strategies to stumble. Performance may increase at times, but then backslide later.
Organizations do their best to include data in their decision-making process. Data acts like tangible evidence to support intangible intuitions, judgment calls and opinions.
However, the complexity of your PPC data can make it hard to use it effectively in decision-making.
After all, the decision-making process is complex as it is. It involves several steps. A very simplified decision-making procedure may look as follows:
Throughout this process, it’s easy to want to take mental shortcuts or fall into old patterns of ignoring the data and replacing it with less-than-accurate gut feelings. This will produce lackluster results compared to an entirely data-driven approach.
Two factors that get in the way of this approach.
The limitless amounts of data you have to aid in the decision-making process can be as much a curse as it is a blessing. Again, it goes back to how well you’re able to manage the complexity of the data.
When you have to analyze the data, it adds time to decision-making manually, hindering your ability to capitalize on opportunities or mitigate risks as quickly as possible. You feel the need to measure everything and look at the decision from all angles.
Analysis paralysis occurs because of the sheer volume of data at your disposal. When you view your spreadsheets, it’s a giant wall of numbers that stops you in your tracks.
The human brain isn’t built to process that kind of information. That’s why an AI brain is far superior when it comes to data crunching.
To make matters worse, marketers have to make hundreds of choices every day. Some teams find it hard to always incorporate data into the conversation because it adds time and effort to the equation.
Each decision requires energy and willpower. The more decisions you make in the day, the less of each you have.
This creates a fatiguing effect that negatively impacts your ability to make correct, well-planned decisions.
Decision fatigue is why many people struggle to stick to diets. In the morning, it’s easy to pick a healthy meal choice. Your brain is fully rested and has the willpower to say no to shortcuts and unhealthy options.
Once it’s late at night, that willpower is depleted. It’s been sapped by all of the other decisions you had to make throughout the day. Then, that guilty pleasure chocolate bar is hard to resist.
The same happens with your marketing. You’ll start ignoring the data and falling back on gut feelings to make snap decisions.
Outsiders may think of PPC advertising as creating catchy messages and slogans to entice Internet users to buy – a modern-day Mad Men, with less drinking and more computers.
In reality, ad creation is only a tiny part of the process. It’s a massive undertaking with complicated decisions and complexities challenging you at every turn.
There are endless questions you can ask and decisions that you must make.
PPC is like a complex machine with moving parts and gears. When one part of the machine breaks down, it affects the entire system.
This is why every decision and adjustment to your account has to be handled with care. You can’t blindly start hammering parts and hoping it will work. You need to have a proper understanding and knowledge of the entire machine to guarantee that it’s always working correctly.
You also need the right Google Ads tool to fix malfunctions.
PPC Signal is an AI-based tool designed to help digital advertisers get the most from their campaigns.
With the power of machine learning algorithms, PPC Signal simplifies your complex data. It automatically detects and assesses risks and opportunities, thereby saving you time and headaches.
This Google Ads tool is packed with features that streamline your workflow and improve your marketing efficiency.
Daily practices, like data monitoring and analysis, are suddenly automated, freeing up hours every week to spend on higher priority tasks.
Really what PPC Signal offers is a steady stream of complete insights for you to investigate and use to improve your campaign performance. You can make powerful steps forward with your performance and growth each day.
Steadily increasing your ROI will be a routine occurrence.
This section will outline all of the ways that PPC Signal improves the lives of marketers.
We’ve discussed at length the complex nature of PPC campaigns. All of the combinations of metrics and dimensions create an ocean of numbers and confusion.
Analysis paralysis happens almost immediately, but not with PPC Signal.
The system tracks all of your combinations and only shows you data signals for the most significant fluctuations in your metrics.
You can focus all of your time and attention on the combinations that actively need attention, instead of trying to monitor every possible combination and only detecting a handful of worthwhile insights.
Catching changes to your PPC performance is a feature that many Google Ads tools offer. The advantage of PPC Signal is the depth and granularity at which changes are tracked.
For instance, your average Google Ads software may alert you that Campaign A has 50 fewer clicks this month.
That’s valuable information, but it requires you to dig into that campaign to understand where those clicks are missing and why they are decreasing. You may have thousands of keywords within a single campaign.
PPC Signal does this work for you. It tracks changes at the keyword level and gives you every detail about the fluctuation. You have all the information you need to make the proper decisions.
No extra analysis is required!
When you have an expansive Google Ads account, PPC Signal may discover hundreds of possible insights for you to pursue.
To make it easier to navigate all of these possible insights, PPC Signal includes filtering options. You can hide any active signals that don’t align with your marketing goals.
You can filter by each campaign, ad group or even individual keywords.
Another strategy is to filter by metrics at each funnel position (bottom, middle and top). For instance, bottom-funnel metrics include conversion rate, cost per conversion, etc., while the top funnel includes impression-related metrics.
With these funnel-related metrics, you can optimize how many users you’re attracting, engaging and converting.
Comparative analysis of your past and current performance is how you determine when metrics are exceeding expectations or falling short of their regular marks.
PPC Signal automatically compares current and past data when discovering insights. This automates your comparative analysis process and allows you to detect risks and opportunities immediately.
By automatically detecting the cause of these risks and opportunities, you can make changes at the root. This enables you to mitigate risks before they cause any damage to your performance and capitalize on opportunities ahead of any competitor.
One of the obstacles in making a decision in PPC marketing is that any change you make to your campaigns will have a ripple effect.
So, you not only have to struggle with making the decision, but also tracking what happens after. PPC Signal monitors the changes you make to your campaigns and tracks the results.
If performance declines after a change, these insights allow you swiftly revert your campaigns to a previous version.
Yes Google Ads have keyword planner tool which provides you information about monthly search volume, competition etc. about the specific keyword. Other than this tool many experts are using PPCexpo Keyword Planner tool as it comes as chrome extension and quickly find specific and similar keywords for your campaigns or SEO strategies.
Google Ads provide complete range of reporting in which you can check your impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions and much more. These metrics need to be monitored on regular basis to bring changes in your strategies. By using PPC Signal for your Google Ads campaigns, you can check the outliers, anomalies and much more scenarios which require high attention in your account.
In the Digital Age, data is vital, but it is also incredibly complex to analyze and work with manually.
Complexities in business can be good, but you need the ability to manage them.
When you’re capable of this, complexity becomes an advantage because you can discover opportunities that other marketers won’t find.
The best Google Ads tool for managing data complexity is PPC Signal.
Through sophisticated machine learning algorithms, PPC Signal simplifies the complexity of your campaign data.
It automatically returns complete insights about the most noteworthy changes currently hitting your Google Ads account. This level of automation allows you to stay on top of every potential risk and possible opportunity.
You’ll respond faster than competitors, reduce wasted spending and become much more productive as a PPC marketer.
That’s a competitive advantage that any PPC manager can get behind!
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