How to Analyze a PPC Campaign Using Dimension Combinations?

Google Ads has helped millions of advertisers reach new users and develop their businesses. Undoubtedly, it is under the sun, the most extensively widely used online advertising platform.

But for all the convenience and accessibility offered by Google Ads, many advertisers who are new to paid search end up feeling disappointed by their initial campaigns outcomes. They do not adequately optimize their Google Ads account as they aren’t much familiar with Google Ads.

You may find Google Ads optimization overwhelming at first. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Optimizing your Google Ads account can be more straightforward than you think. All you need is a little planning and preparation.

When working with large and complicated accounts, you may find it challenging to identify which factor needs optimization. That’s where combinations and signals can help you.

In this blog, we’ll look at the role of signals in pay-per-click (PPC) optimization. Plus, we’ll share tips on how to analyze a PPC campaign to help you better optimize your ads.

Considerations for Your PPC Campaign Analysis

Before you start PPC campaign analysis, you should clearly understand your paid search campaigns’ primary goal. Otherwise, you won’t be on the right track and you may end up undoing your own progress.

Here are a few considerations that you must keep in mind while doing PPC Analysis:

Assess Your Campaign Performance

When running several PPC campaigns, you should see which campaign performs best for your primary key performance indicators (KPIs). Moreover, keep an eye on campaigns that might be playing a supporting role. You can analyze the summary of your campaign based on the funnel.

First, you should analyze your impressions. Next, you should see the number of clicks you obtained in your campaign. You should also see your click through rate (CTR) and conversions. Moreover, it would help determine how campaigns cost you overall and waste on each campaign. It’s also essential to analyze and determine the reason for an increasing or decreasing quality score.

Analyze in Terms of Hour of the Day and Day of the Week

Your PPC campaign can’t perform uniformly all the time. You may observe excellent and bad peaks throughout the day and the week. Therefore, analyzing your campaign data based on different days of the week and hours of the day can give you a clearer picture of the campaign performance. This analysis can help you to optimize your campaign timings.

Analyze Your Geo-Locations

If your PPC campaign is targeting multiple locations, then it’s time to analyze in detail. Not all locations perform equally. Some may be performing well for impressions but may not be giving you more clicks.

Likewise, some may have clicks but no conversions. Therefore, analyze your campaign concerning your objectives and shortlist your high potential locations so that you can concentrate more on those campaigns.

Analyze Your Devices

Not all devices perform similarly. The device-based analysis brings your results on the surface so that you can identify which device is draining your budget and giving you no results. Moreover, you can also figure out which device is showing the best results.

Remember that one of your devices may perform best on Day 1, yet not as much on Day 2. So only analyzing devices in terms of your metrics is not a good option. You should think more broadly and make some combinations.

What is a Combination, and Why is it Important in PPC?

A combination means to join several different components into a single group. Technically speaking, a combination is a mathematical approach that determines the number of possible arrangements in collecting items where the selection order is not essential.

This means you can choose the items in any order. Now, you must be wondering why we are discussing combinations in digital marketing and PPC, right? That’s because combinations are quite important here as well.

Gone are the days when you’d only use single dimensions and metrics to analyze your outcomes. These kinds of analyses aren’t wrong, but they only give you a superficial understanding. If you want to perform an in-depth analysis, you must analyze by having different data combinations.

For instance, see how your campaign performs over the last 30 days on other devices and different timings. It would help if you had combinations of devices, days and hours.

In a PPC campaign, there are many dimensions such as keyword, device, location, departing, match type, etc. You can combine these dimensions with metrics like click, cost, conversion, and so on. This combination will help you define a user interaction that measures and shows the ad performance in various ways.

One of the essential aspects of managing a campaign is tracking and assessing your ads’ performance as a PPC advertiser. However, reviewing your PPC campaign performance can be quite intimidating.

So, how do you find combinations in your Google Ads? You should try the PPCexpo Combination Calculator. It presents a multi-criteria decision model to handle diversity and possible conflict by achieving the right balance across a wide range of creative alternatives.

You can access combination calculator from here

This tool also helps justify the appropriateness of using an analytical hierarchy process to derive effective combinations of marketing goals and innovative strategies for a particular campaign. In this manner, it helps you detect the best-performing creative combinations by overcoming your PPC campaigns’ complexity.

How to Find Signals in Google Ads

When working with large and complex accounts, it is quite challenging to identify the campaign’s opportunities and risks. Signals can help you better optimize your PPC campaigns, which would later yield a higher return on investment (ROI). Signals can be positive or negative, meaning few signals can be useful, showing if something good happened. A negative signal occurs when a PPC manager’s inactivity on a particular issue could result in a loss of performance. A positive signal exists when performing a specific action, or set of actions, would lead to improvement.

Let’s consider a use-case through which you can better understand how to find signals. For instance, the desktop could appear as your best device at the campaign level. But does that mean the desktop will be the best device on Tuesday as well? Not necessarily.

On Tuesday, you might get most of the conversions from tablet devices. At the campaign level, you can’t see this pattern. You will have to combine the device dimension with the day of the week to extract this signal. By looking at this pattern, you can adjust your bid on a desktop on Tuesday to get more conversions on this day.

Similarly, if mobile is your top device on Wednesday, does that mean it will be the best-performing device on Wednesday at 6 PM as well? Not really. It’s entirely possible that on Wednesday at 6 PM, the desktop could be your best device. You cannot see this pattern in one or two dimension on the upper level of the combinations. On Wednesday at 6 PM, you’ll have to create a rule to adjust your desktop bid, so your campaign performs well.

As you go deeper into the combinations, you will observe completely different insights that aren’t seen at the one dimension level. Suppose your CTR was going well for the past 30 days, but suddenly it dropped. This situation is also a signal.

Likewise, suppose you have five keywords in your campaign, and four are performing well, but only one is not doing well. However, after 30 days, suddenly, that 5^th keyword starts performing well, so that’s also a signal. If your average cost per click (CPC) starts increasing from the last ten days (points), that’s a signal. All these signal insights are an opportunity that can drive your campaign to the next level of optimization.

Now you know about the role of signals in PPC. You must be thinking about finding such signals and opportunities in your campaign, particularly when handling vast and intricate accounts. Only a few tools are available in the market, revealing the hidden opportunities, and PPC Signal stands out among them.

Most of the PPC optimization tools that help you figure out how to analyze a PPC campaign will give you the answers to predefined questions, which revolve around top campaigns, top devices, top keywords, etc.

That’s fine, but it is not the end of optimization. PPC Signal can reveal completely different insights that you may have never seen before – thanks to its ability to work on the combinations. Using PPC Signal, you can streamline and simplify your campaigns to improve your sales and conversions and achieve the desired ROI.

The following are some characteristics that show how PPC Signal is different from other PPC management tools.

How to Use PPC Signal When you perform in-depth PPC analysis, you can have a better idea of your ad campaign. Moreover, you can use those insights to improve your PPC campaigns, driving better outcomes. As a PPC marketer, you perhaps want to know how to use PPC Signal to manage your campaigns better.

A vast majority of marketers try to manage PPC campaigns with broad strokes. However, significant changes may only yield short-term advantages and come with substantial risks.

Moreover, they often aren’t needed. Think of successful PPC management as a masterpiece sculpture. It requires small, continuous, and positive changes. Over time, these slight changes result in a combined benefit.

The small improvements rule understands that small gains will eventually accumulate to bring massive improvements over time. By breaking large projects, such as PPC management, into small components, it becomes easier to identify opportunities to make slight improvements.

That’s where PPC Signal can help you. It essentially brings to the surface the hidden opportunities in your campaign, which needs some small modifications to produce a good ROI.

These small improvements add up quickly. If you try to improve 1% every day for a whole year, your accumulative advantage would equal a 3,778% increment. It’s challenging to maintain a continuous upwards trend, and there may be days when that 1% change is in the opposite direction.

The good news is that positive changes have a much more significant influence than negative ones. A bad day won’t destroy all your efforts.

Remember, PPC is a constantly-changing environment. What worked yesterday may or may not work tomorrow. So the challenge is to identify your rising and falling stars proactively and consistently.

Using the AI-powered PPC Signal, you can auto-detect insightful changes in your campaigns without having to lift a finger. It helps you to filter out the noise and concentrate on the signals that bring in improvement. By focusing on the signals, you will make better decisions continuously and outrank your competition constantly.

How to Deeply Analyze the Signal Simple signals allow you to compare data according to the past data. However, through these signals, you won’t see the detailed insights as they comprise simple metrics.

For example, when running a campaign, simple signals can show you which devices respond better, which location is performing well, and so on. However, if you want to deeply analyze your campaign’s performance, you must consider the rich signals.

Rich signals consist of a combination of different dimensions. For example, you want to know the number of clicks, impressions, or shares you were getting every day when the desktop was the best device on Tuesday 6 PM.

Through rich signals, you can see these hidden opportunities in your campaign, making it more efficient for you. Rich signals need a compound and in-depth knowledge to identify and analyze them.

The Decisive Factor

How to analyze a PPC campaign? As discussed earlier, PPC Signal can show you the concealed opportunities and help you take some actions against every signal. Identify the action by using past data.

For instance, a signal shows that previously you were getting more clicks but suddenly, your clicks dropped to some extent while the impressions remained the same. Drop in clicks occurred because your campaign’s ad rank had fallen to some extent, which is due to the quality score of your ad getting worse.

Therefore, to overcome this problem, you may increase your ad’s quality score, which is a long-term process. You can just set the Max CPC for keywords. Depending on the past performance of metrics and dimensions, you can determine what action you need at what stage.

Wrap Up

Handling huge and intricate accounts necessitates the use of smart tools like PPC Signal. The truth is that no matter how good you are as a digital marketer, you can’t perform miracles if you don’t have the right expertise in the domain.

If you wish to see improvements in your prospective digital marketing strategy, you should plan carefully beforehand. In this regard, you will need tools like PPC Signal that can identify the hidden opportunities. With these insights, you can make smarter advertising decisions.