Marketers collect heaps of data with the intention of turning these raw numbers and information into valuable insights.
Data insights are fundamental in knowing how to measure the success of an advertising campaign.
What is an insight in advertising? In advertising and marketing, insights are when you discover new, actionable information relevant to your campaigns.
These clues can help you measure the success of your strategies and discover new ways to increase performance.
The more you dig into your data to extract insights, the more possible clues you’ll uncover to optimize your advertising campaigns.
This discussion will take a deep dive into marketing insights and how to measure the success of your advertising campaigns.
Let’s get started.
PPC campaigns are one of the most substantial sources of marketing data. Every time you start a new campaign, it begins generating data immediately, whether it’s the number of people clicking the ad, seeing it, not seeing it, etc.
With the proper application of analysis tools, you can tap into the value hidden behind all of this data – insights.
Insights offer a deep understanding of many facets of PPC marketing, including:
All of these are essential components to a successful PPC strategy. If you fail to understand just one element, it will hurt your overall performance.
You want to make the most out of your data. It can be a treasure trove of valuable information on how to optimize your efforts.
That said, data analytics is tricky. You need to collect, filter, clean, process, normalize and analyze heaps of marketing data. The size, speed and complexity of all of this information make insights challenging to acquire.
To help you, here are some quick tips to bear in mind:
These tips will help steer your data analysis efforts in the proper directions!
Insights, like your data, come in many shapes and sizes. Not all data is valuable, which means not all your insights are useful either.
For an insight to be profitable, it needs to have specific properties.
Marketing analysis happens in three stages: past, present and future. Each frame of time is essential to the process to get the best insights possible from your data.
The process starts by analyzing past performance. Your historical data makes up the bulk of the information you collect from your campaigns.
Your past data provides benchmarks of what’s “normal.” Using these benchmarks, you can detect any time that your campaigns are acting abnormally.
You can also use past data to identify the strategies that flourished in the past, versus those that flopped.
It’s the classic saying that you need to know your past to understand the present.
The past informs you whether your current performance is above or below average.
By comparing past performance to your present metrics, you can better understand what’s happening in the current market. You’ll know what strategies are working fine, which need more attention and more.
That said, the past can’t tell you everything about the present. Sometimes, customers change their behaviors, ad platforms change their guidelines, new technologies affect the market, etc.
These shifts happen rather unexpectedly and require quick responses. You need to analyze the current status of the ad environment to understand and adapt appropriately.
The lessons of the past and present inform you about the future. You can analyze the trajectory of current trends and predict where they’ll be in the coming weeks.
This foresight enables you to proactively act ahead of changes, rather than reacting to shifts that have already occurred.
In any form of marketing, speed is essential. The faster you can capitalize on an emerging opportunity or stop an issue before it escalates into a crisis, the easier it is to maintain your performance and improve it.
Data-driven decisions regarding the future are far more accurate than baseless assumptions. When you can analyze what will happen in the future, you can practically guarantee that your strategies will strive.
The impact of data and insights on the goals and success of your advertising campaigns is not new information. Every digital marketer understands that their data needs to be consulted when making new plans or adjusting old ones.
Yet, many of these marketers fail to consistently and efficiently obtain actionable insights from their data.
There’s a substantial disconnect between understanding the importance of data and knowing how to acquire insights. Several factors cause this knowledge gap.
Lack of data is never a problem for marketers. Nearly everything you do in the digital environment creates data. There is always information available to analyze.
The problem is having too much data. This is where the term “big data” comes from. This term describes the massive volumes of information that bombard businesses daily.
The bulk of this information is irrelevant “stuff” that doesn’t align or further your marketing/business goals.
You have to sift through all of this noise to get to the data that matters. Without the proper tools and structure in place, you’ll spend more time on this task than the actual analysis part.
Time is a crucial resource because marketers have mountains of responsibilities and duties to perform. When you waste time sifting through data, you don’t have enough remaining to analyze and extract actionable insights.
Once you’re capable of efficiently filtering that ocean of data, you need to know what to do with the good parts that remain.
There are two issues here. The most obvious issue is your own expertise and knowledge when it comes to data science. If you aren’t statistically minded or have strong analysis skills, engaging with your data to find insights may be challenging and more time-consuming than it should be.
The skill gap in data analysis is why many companies hire specialized marketing analysts that are adept at turning data into actionable insights.
The second issue is access. You don’t know what to do with your data because it’s spread across different channels and sources.
Plus, Google Ads and other major platforms may hold some data back or make it difficult to interact with your metrics in the ways you want.
These various obstacles – big data problems, expertise gaps, ad platform restrictions – slow down the process for obtaining insights.
If you’re unable to overcome these roadblocks quickly, it hurts the value of the insights you obtain.
In other words, you can spend so much time analyzing the data that the results or conclusions you reach are no longer valid or useful.
You’re detecting trends, shifts and other occurrences that have already come and gone.
Timing is crucial!
For instance, you notice that your ad budget is depleting rapidly. After only a week, you’ve used 50% of your monthly ad budget. Panicked, you start investigating why this is happening.
Unfortunately, your analysis process is slow and your budget continues to disappear faster and faster. By the time you locate the source, you’ve lost hundreds of dollars in overpriced clicks.
This is why predicting the future is such a crucial part of the insight process. If you can anticipate this type of negative trend, you can act before your budget is spent unexpectedly.
With the world becoming increasingly reliant on data, insights are a competitive difference-maker.
The businesses capable of efficiently transforming big data into actionable, relevant insights will win. These companies will:
To experience these profound advantages in your own campaigns, you need to learn how to overcome the various challenges and roadblocks of data analysis.
Your marketing data size, speed, complexity and unpredictability all need to be effectively managed to obtain insights efficiently.
How do you get started?
Marketers often make the mistake of working harder to try and overcome data analysis challenges.
The rationale is easy to understand: “The more time I spend on analysis, the more insights I potentially receive.”
There are several flaws in this approach. Committing more resources to the process isn’t efficient and can burn you and your team out.
Data fatigue and analysis paralysis are real conditions that occur when you spend too much time staring at spreadsheets or obsessing over small fluctuations in metrics.
Not only will this demoralize the team, but it can also lead to flawed analysis procedures. When you’re fatigued or overwhelmed, you start taking shortcuts or falling back on gut feelings and assumptions.
The solution isn’t to funnel more hours and resources into data management and analysis. The real answer is to find the right strategies that allow your team to extract insights using the least amount of resources.
A sure way to hurt how efficiently you obtain insights is to ask questions that have already been answered. Essentially, you’re performing analysis that’s already been conducted.
The reason this happens is simple: lack of communication.
PPC advertising doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is part of your overall marketing strategy and directly impacts your sales, lead generation, brand awareness strategies and more.
The various teams in your company that are devoted to these different areas are all using data. They are asking and answering questions through data analysis.
Their insights can be useful to your own strategies and vice versa.
For instance, your product development team may analyze what features users are most interested in. This data could help your advertising campaigns and the profitable keywords you target.
If you aren’t actively reporting and sharing analysis findings across all teams, your business culture is not prepared for the data-driven Digital Age. You’re wasting time on redundant analysis projects and failing to come together as a team.
In the words of the esteemed Vanilla Ice, “Stop, collaborate and listen.”
When you want to increase your efficiency, automation is almost always the answer.
By automating certain tasks or steps in a process, you preserve your resources for other duties that may be a higher priority.
Ideally, you want to automate resource-intensive, low impact tasks that require little or no human input. Data analysis and management are ripe with these types of jobs.
For instance, collecting data and filtering out noise is necessary to manage the size of your data. Despite this necessity, it’s an incredibly cumbersome task with little value in the grand scheme of things.
In some instances, the algorithms and AI technology behind automation tools are even better equipped to handle the task than humans.
Remember, changes to your ad campaigns occur constantly. You have to monitor your metrics for these changes to detect potential risks or meaningful opportunities.
Unless you have a team of marketers working around the clock, it’s impossible to be watching your campaigns constantly. Machines, on the other hand, don’t need sleep or breaks. They are always on and always working.
AI is a particularly powerful technology for analysis because of the high level of complexity in your advertising data. Human brains aren’t built to process thousands of numbers at once.
Sure, you can train yourself to be better at number-crunching and statistical analysis, but a machine will do the work instantly.
PPC campaign management software and Google Ads tools are helpful to improve your efficiency as an advertiser.
These solutions are incredibly prevalent on the market. There are tools for all different types of purposes. You could invest in a general Google Ads tool or one that offers very specific features.
All of this variety is nice because it ensures that you can find the exact solution to fit your needs. The wide selection also creates a challenge. How do you identify the tool with the most value for your team?
You may have to conduct extensive research on many different tools to find the perfect fit.
Here are a few things to remember:
If you take the time to vet each potential candidate through these steps, you should have no problem finding the perfect tool for your needs.
Don’t have time to research marketing tools? Here’s our recommendation: PPC Signal. It is one of the best PPC optimization tools for obtaining insights and improving your campaigns.
Its features are aimed at helping marketers overcome the complexity of their PPC data and management through AI and machine learning systems.
If you want to harness the power of automation and efficiently obtain insights to improve your advertising campaigns, PPC Signal is an excellent fit.
This section will explore the many advantages of this tool.
Detecting changes to your PPC campaigns is a crucial step in account optimization. The sooner you spot an opportunity, the quicker you can respond and capitalize.
The same is true of risks. You don’t want issues in your account to go unnoticed. If you don’t mitigate threats early, they can turn into major crises.
PPC Signal automates this detection process and alerts you whenever there is a trend, shift, anomaly or other occurrences in your data.
The system shows you every active signal in your account from the main dashboard.
It’s like having a full-time watchkeeper for your account that catches any risk or opportunity in your account.
There’s no better way to enhance your ability to obtain insights from your advertising data than to have them delivered to you automatically. That’s exactly what PPC Signal offers.
Every time you access the PPC Signal dashboard, you see a complete list of your account’s most significant performance changes.
Each alert that the PPC Signal system detects and presents is loaded with information. You don’t have to go digging for extra details to understand the change.
Consider the following sample signal:
You can see that CTR has been decreasing since Thursday, April 8. The signal also shows how the current value of CTR compares to where it used to be.
The parts of your campaign that are affected, as well as any dimensions (device type, location, hour of the day, etc.), are displayed to show where this change is taking place.
Finally, a sparkline chart is included to depict the change visually. Visualizations like this one help you see the data for yourself, without having to analyze raw numbers.
Clicking the Explore button opens up the signal and shows you more details, like an expanded chart, a tabular view of the data and more.
PPC Signal will let you know any time that there is a notable change in your accounts. Naturally, some alerts will be more valuable than others.
To ensure that you don’t spend your time sifting through your signals to find the ones pertinent to your goals, PPC Signal includes several filtering options.
These settings remove any signals that don’t fit your criteria, so you’re only left with the ones you want.
You can filter by:
In a large account, you might have hundreds of active signals. These options make this number much more manageable. They allow you to interact with the campaigns, keywords, metrics and dimensions that matter most.
Again, it’s all about efficiency. By removing non-vital signals, you can find the changes affecting your key performance metrics.
Insights are new information that deepens your understanding of a given topic. In advertising and marketing, you discover insights by analyzing metrics, sales and other data. These insights help you improve your strategies and deepen your understanding of audiences, competitors and the market as a whole.
There are many tools available to PPC marketers to help uncover insights. PPC Signal is one of the best PPC optimization tools out there. It harnesses the power of AI to swift analyze PPC campaign data and find the most noteworthy changes.
Want to know how to measure the success of an advertising campaign? You need to analyze your PPC data with PPC signal.
Your campaigns are constantly generating more and more data each day. The bulk of this information isn’t going to be useful. The potentially valuable parts need to be analyzed and transformed into actionable insights before that value can be realized.
This is a difficult process that is full of obstacles and headaches. As a result, most marketers are rich with data, but poor in insight.
You don’t want to fall into this category. Instead, you want to have the tools and processes in place to generate insights from your data efficiently.
PPC Signal is one of these tools. It automates the tedious parts of data analysis and returns complete, actionable insights on your ad performance.
Stop drowning in data and start prospering with insights.
We will help your ad reach the right person, at the right time
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