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Your marketing campaigns aim to provide an experience to your audience that encourages them to act in some manner.
To complete this objective effectively and consistently, you need data – tons of it.
Data shows you how to measure your marketing campaign effectiveness and how to improve PPC performance in the future.
While it is easy to launch a new marketing campaign, optimizing it takes time and constant attention.
Google Ads analysis is full of challenges that can stop marketers in their tracks.
In this discussion, we’ll explore how to measure marketing campaign effectiveness and overcome these challenges through the power of automation.
If you want to maximize the value and insights you gain from your Google Ads data, you’re in the right place. You will learn about the smart tool which helps you to gain better insights than any tool in the market which claims to help you in optimizing your campaigns effectively.
Let’s get started.
Through the Internet and globalization, businesses face more competition than ever. You could be competing with companies thousands of miles away.
Thus, it is crucial that you have the tools and processes available to measure your marketing campaign effectiveness.
Only then can you know when your marketing strategies are on the right path towards success.
There are three crucial ways that knowing how to measure a marketing campaign’s effectiveness serves businesses.
Your business and marketing team have specific goals that they want to reach. These objectives inform why you invest in marketing and Google Ads.
Whenever you have a question about why a choice is being made or what option to pick, you should refer to your goals.
However, having goals and actually measuring those goals are two different challenges.
In Google Ads analysis, you have many metrics and dimensions to consider, making it hard to optimize everything at once.
Savvy marketers know to look at their key performance indicators (KPIs) first. These are the handful of metrics and components that directly impact goal progress.
This is critical in measuring marketing campaign effectiveness. You want to know which areas of your Google Ads account are providing the most relevant results to your goals.
As you measure marketing campaign effectiveness, you’re going to discover emerging opportunities and potential risks in your account.
An opportunity occurs when there is a positive change happening in your account. Taking action on this data will increase performance, thereby edging you closer to your goals.
A risk happens where there is a negative change affecting your account. In this scenario, taking action will prevent a loss of performance from occurring. You might see an increase, but it isn’t guaranteed.
Some marketers become blinded by constantly trying to capture the ‘next big thing’ and neglect to watch out for risks.
The problem with this is inactivity on opportunities doesn’t create any problems for your account. You’re missing out on potentially increasing your performance, but you aren’t losing any progress due to your inactivity.
Risks, on the other hand, require some sort of action to prevent negative performance loss from continuing.
The more you measure your marketing campaign effectiveness, the more likely you will detect the earliest signs of risks and opportunities.
Part of detecting opportunities and risks is learning what works and what doesn’t in your marketing campaign.
Your Google Ads analysis will uncover the entire marketing landscape, including audience insights, competitor details and more.
This is knowledge that will serve you beyond the realm of PPC marketing. For instance, you can apply audience insights to learn how to develop better products.
The data behind what’s working and what isn’t helps you back your marketing decisions by evidence and numbers.
There’s no guesswork or assuming the best course of action when your data definitively tells you.
When measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, there are three types of PPC marketing insights that you want to extract from your data.
These kernels of information hold tremendous value. They will help you successfully market your business and products.
You want to know everything you can about your target audience. Audience insights teach you what they like, don’t like, when and where they gather and so much more.
You can use all of this intel to refine your audience targeting, not just in the realm of PPC, but in all of your marketing and communication efforts.
These insights also help you perform deeper and more accurate audience segmentation. You’ll really begin to develop a complete understanding of each individual group within your customer base. Using this information, you can better target messages and offers to each demographic or psychographic profile.
Keep in mind that your audience is constantly changing, meaning these insights are not set in stone. The behaviors, interests and attitudes that you discover today may shift in the future.
Perhaps the most obvious reason for tapping into your PPC data is to find ways to improve your campaigns.
This is what we covered in the previous section – finding out what’s working and what isn’t and detecting risks and opportunities.
Any insight that helps you improve your PPC performance is valuable for obvious reasons, especially when it enables you to increase your ROI.
With improvement insights, you can guarantee your marketing campaign effectiveness by reducing waste and optimizing returns.
Improvement insights aren’t just about maximizing your metrics. It’s about getting the best results for the budget you have.
As you conduct your Google Ads analysis, you won’t just learn about the current status of your campaigns. You can also begin predicting what will happen tomorrow and the next day.
Predictive analytics is a form of advanced data analysis that uses your current and past performance to forecast how your campaigns will perform tomorrow.
This is a supreme advantage because speed means value in marketing. The sooner you can act on emerging opportunities or pending risks, the better.
If you’re the first marketer to capitalize on a new keyword trend, you can advertise for almost no money because there’s no competition.
Similarly, you want to negate areas of wasted ad spend as soon as possible. Imagine that your Avg. CPC is steadily rising. You start the week spending around $0.25 per click, but it gets higher and higher each time. Suddenly, you’re paying $5.00+ for each click. That’s a dramatic difference!
If you predicted this negative trend just as it began to spike, you could save yourself quite a lot of money.
That’s the power of predictive insights!
It’s no secret that your Google Ads data holds great value and possibility. That’s why businesses go to such great lengths to collect, organize and analyze their data.
Unfortunately, collecting data is far easier than analyzing. As a result, many marketers find themselves rich in data, but poor in insight.
In other words, they have buckets of data available, but lack the means to tap into the information and extract any real value.
Here are just some of the challenges associated with Google Ads analysis that you need to overcome.
You’ve heard the term ”big data” before. This label is used to describe the sheer volume of marketing data available to businesses.
Remember, every single interaction between your brands and customers produces data. Every click, conversion, cost, bounce, etc., holds potential value for your Google Ads analysis.
If you’re operating a sizable account with multiple campaigns, you could be looking at data for thousands of keywords. The larger your account, the more stuff there is to measure.
There comes the point where the size of your data is so large that manual analysis is no longer possible.
Aside from its size, marketing data is also notably complex. You have several metrics that need close attention and all correlate with one another.
For example, if you want to figure out why your clicks are down, you may have to look at the data alongside various other metrics to find the answer. Is it because impressions are down?
Maybe the problem is a spike in CPC that’s depleting your budget? Or, is it something else?
The other side of data variance is the source. Not only do you need your Google Ads data, but you’ll also need to gather figures from your website analytics to track conversions accurately.
When you measure your marketing campaign effectiveness, you want to find insights that are accurate and verified. After all, you don’t want to be making decisions based on inaccurate data!
Luckily, data quality isn’t too much of a struggle in PPC because most of the information comes straight from your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts.
That said, you do have to be careful when pulling data from these two sources (and any others you want to use). There may be some data included in both channels and you don’t want it to be counted twice during the analysis.
There may also be discrepancies between labels. For instance, one channel may use the “cost-per-acquisition” label, while another uses “cost-per-action.” Even though these are the same measure, they may be counted separately because of this.
As a rule of thumb, any data you analyze should be reviewed and double-checked for errors.
The size and complexity of PPC data require some level of data science mastery. This is not a skill that you typically think about in marketing.
Yet, today’s businesses are increasingly hiring marketers with a background in data science. Alternatively, some companies hire people with data science expertise to work alongside the marketing department.
The lack of data expertise will undoubtedly be felt, especially as your Google Ads analysis needs to grow more and more.
That said, it isn’t an insurmountable obstacle. Thanks to marketing automation tools and software, you can stay on top of your data without any advanced expertise.
The best way to overcome the challenges of Google Ads analysis is to invest in an automation tool.
This is the only way to efficiently track, analyze and act on the many changes constantly impacting your Google Ads account.
Even if you have a team of data scientists working on your account, they can only do so much with their time.
With marketing automation software, time is not a factor. The system is always on and constantly monitoring your accounts. It’s like having a 24/7 watchdog making sure that everything is running smoothly.
Marketing automation tools come in many different varieties. For PPC marketing, the best Google Ads tool to automate your management processes is PPC Signal.
What is PPC Signal?
PPC Signal is a management tool designed for Google Ads users that leverages artificial intelligence technology to automatically track, analyze and present notable changes in your account.
PPC Signal snaps into action whenever there are trends, shifts, anomalies, outliers or other notable events occurring in your Google Ads data.
It gathers relevant details to the change and analyzes the data based on your current and past PPC performance.
Then, the system presents these findings as a “signal” that appears on the tool’s main dashboard. This signal includes answers to all of these critical questions:
Essentially, every signal represents a complete insight that is ready for your action. When you access your PPC Signal dashboard, you see every active signal currently impacting your account.
All you have to do is choose which insight to explore first.
Let’s take a look at some screenshots of a sample Google Ads account using PPC Signal. This will help you see how PPC Signal works.
Some background: John owns a watch store that sells a variety of different brands and models. While his brick-and-mortar store is good at selling high-value, designer watches from top brands (Rolex, Hubolt, TAG Heuer and others), John wants to move into smart fitness watches.
He decides that selling these products online may serve his business better. So, he starts a Google Ads account and creates several campaigns. John understands that these products are the hot new thing for health and fitness enthusiasts. It won’t be easy to compete with other online vendors.
After a few weeks of search advertising, John invests in PPC Signal to help optimize his marketing campaigns. After all, he has a store to run! His time is valuable.
This is what John sees when he accesses the PPC Signal tool.
Currently, his account has 21 active signals. There is also one signal he’s bookmarked and two that he’s actioned or resolved.
John can scroll through these 21 signals and look for ones that interest him and his marketing goals. Alternatively, he can take advantage of the filter options along the left side.
With these filters, John can elect to search signals by his KPIs through the Metrics option.
This narrows those 21 active signals to just 5.
Alternatively, John may decide to begin optimizing a specific advertising campaign on his account.
Once John finds an interesting signal, the Explore feature allows him to open the insight and take a look under the hood.
Remember, each signal is a packaged signal with all the details you need. Clicking Explore allows you to see the data even closer.
Here, John sees a much more expanded view of the Sparkline chart. There are multiple features that John can use to interact with the data. For instance, he can elect to add another metric to see how this change in clicks is impacting, or impacted by, other data.
Other features in the Explore menu include:
Once John is done examining the signal, he’s ready for action. He has all of the information he needs to understand what’s changing and how to resolve it.
However, since John is relatively new to Google Ads analysis, he may not be sure what to do about a particular change.
Luckily, PPC Signal has him covered with the Take Action feature.
This utilizes PPC Signal’s AI engine once more to suggest a follow-up action to prevent further loss of performance.
How To Measure Marketing Campaign Effectiveness? You can see how PPC Signal assists John in managing his data in a highly efficient manner and gives him the ability to act swiftly on the latest changes to his account, with minimal effort on his part.
Google Ads optimization is the process that marketers undertake to improve their campaigns. By analyzing PPC metrics, marketers can discover ways to increase the performance and results of their marketing strategies.
This optimization process is ongoing. There are always new trends, shifts and other changes to the data that can be analyzed and acted upon.
With your marketing campaigns in a constant state of change and metrics going up, down, left and right, managing a Google Ads account entirely by hand isn’t feasible.
This would require countless hours of tedious work as you update your bids, keyword targets and other parameters.
Luckily, automation removes most of this tedium from the PPC campaign management process. Through machine learning algorithms, an automated marketing tool can make instantaneous adjustments to your strategies after every ad interaction.
It’s an absolute necessity if you want your PPC campaigns to be optimized!
To reiterate, marketers are often rich in data but poor in insight. It is easy to collect data, but it is very challenging to convert that raw information into actionable insights. That said, if you want to maximize the number of insights you gain from your Google Ads data, there are a few things you can do:
Knowing how to measure your marketing campaign effectiveness is vital to operating a successful Google Ads account.
It’s also crucial for running good marketing strategies outside of Google Ads. The audience insights you’ll acquire from Google Ads analysis will help your entire business prosper.
To extract the maximum number of insights from your Google Ads data, you need the right automation solution to efficiently and effectively manage your analysis efforts.
Otherwise, you’ll have to spend countless hours near-obsessing over every metric change that hits your account.
The truth is that Google Ads analysis doesn’t have to be so challenging. With PPC Signal, you receive packaged, complete insights every day that allows you to stay on top of every significant trend, shift or other change affecting your campaigns.
It’s as easy as choosing which signal to explore and taking action – no data science expertise is required!
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