How to Optimize Google Ads: Actionable Insights Will Help to Make the Process Simple and Trackable

Pay-per-click advertising, also known as PPC marketing, is a time-tested digital marketing strategy that continues to emerge as one of the top ways to attract customers, increase revenue and grow your business.

While there are ample opportunities in the PPC space, it isn’t a particularly easy marketing dimension to traverse. PPC best practices, strategies and features are always changing, which makes optimizing your Google Ads campaigns a constant challenge of hitting a moving target.

Google will have many marketers believing the opposite —that all it takes are a couple of keywords and a budget. Then, like magic, your business begins to increase its traffic.

If it were that easy, anyone could do it.

The challenge of optimization only worsens when you’re managing a large, complicated account. The more your campaigns grow, the more possible combinations there are, which increases the complexity ten-fold. It becomes impossible to manage and know how to optimize Google Ads campaigns without the help of third-party tools.

PPC Signal has a unique approach to PPC campaign management. It works by automatically detecting possible insights and opportunities for improving campaign performance. Then, the marketer can dedicate all of their time towards browsing these signals, prioritizing which ones to pursue, and putting these insights into action.

You can access PPC Signal from here.

This discussion will look at what types of insights PPC Signal provides and how you can use these negative and positive signals to improve your campaigns more efficiently.

What Is PPC Signal? An Introduction To PPC Signal Campaign Management Tool

PPC Signal is an AI-based campaign management tool used to analyze PPC data more efficiently and discover those hidden opportunities and risks that are often obscured in the sheer volume of data created by your campaigns.

With the power of machine learning algorithms, PPC Signal is able to effortlessly analyze even the most complex PPC accounts and find meaningful insights. It then brings those insights to the surface and allows a marketer to determine the best course of action.

This system is designed to allocate a marketer’s time to the tasks that really require their expertise, experience and common sense. By automating the tedious and resource-intensive process of monitoring campaign data to detect changes, PPC Signal allows a marketer to put all of his or her time, attention and resources towards exploring these insights and choosing the ones with the most value.

The more signals a marketer is able to resolve, the greater the returns. PPC Signal makes it easy to make improvement and positive change a part of your daily marketing routine. When you can stack even small improvements each day, these seemingly tiny steps forward suddenly become giant leaps in progress.

In the next sections, we’ll look at the benefits of using PPC Signal.

Change Reaction

Changes to your PPC campaigns are occurring at all times, whether audiences changing their search behaviors, a competitor adjusting their bidding strategies or another reason.

Often, the difference between a good PPC strategy and an excellent one is how fast account owners react to changes. “React” isn’t even the right word because a reaction implies that the change has already occurred and you’re responding to it.

Ideally, you want to be proactive in your approach to campaign changes, even to the point of predicting when an emerging change is about to happen and adjusting before it starts to affect performance.

The sooner action takes place, the higher the value. If it is an opportunity, you want to be the first through the door. If it is a negative change you are responding to, you limit the damage it causes by the faster you react.

With PPC Signal’s constant monitoring of campaign data, there are no changes that will go undetected. It is easy to see trends and shifts just beginning to boil to the surface. PPC Signal’s observations will let you see around corners and stay ahead of changes.

Minimize, Maximize and Optimize

Every insight that PPC Signal uncovers is classified as either a risk or an opportunity. In other words, every observation that the tool makes is either good or bad.

A bad signal is labeled as a risk. When a marketer does not resolve a risk, it creates a negative dip in performance. A good, positive signal represents an opportunity for your campaign. If you take the appropriate action, your campaign will experience positive growth.

To make matters even more manageable, PPC Signal colors positive insights in green, and risk signals in red. And, you can filter the findings to only include one type of signal.

This ability to minimize risks and maximize opportunities with swift efficiency is a fast way towards perfecting how to optimize Google Ads campaigns.

Simplify Strategy, Amplify Success

PPC campaign optimization is an ongoing process; it can’t be achieved overnight. However, that doesn’t mean that optimization needs to be complicated or tedious. PPC Signal creates a simplistic strategy for improving your campaigns and growing PPC performance.

All it takes is improving your PPC campaign by just 1% each day. It may seem insignificant, but these small, daily improvements grow and build off of one another.

If your campaign grew by 1% each day, your total growth at the end of the year would not be 365%, as you may expect. Instead, your complete growth would be 3,778%.

Making just a 1% change each day is easy, thanks to PPC Signal. You have a complete list of opportunities and risks that, with the appropriate action, will help lead your campaign to positive growth each day.

Filter The Noise, Focus On The Signal

Your campaigns produce a lot of data. With all of that data, PPC Signal will quickly turn up several insights. Insights are valuable, but they are not all created equally. You want to prioritize your time by following the insights with the most value for your campaigns.

How do you know which signals to prioritize? This is where your expertise and common sense as a PPC marketer enters the equation! It’s up to you to decide which insights offer the most promise to your business and marketing objectives.

To make your hunt for the right insights easier, PPC Signal offers a number of filters that you can apply to the data. These filters allow you to remove the noise from less valuable signals and focus on the insights that are most pertinent to your campaign objectives.

You can filter signals by:

• Account/Campaign
• Ad group
• Keyword
• Device type
• Hour of day
• Geo-location
• Signal type
• Signal quality
• Metric types

Resolve Outliers

With PPC Signal, outliers are easy to detect and you can analyze them more efficiently. Outliers are bound to occur in your campaigns. They are something that every PPC manager experiences.

Outliers are sudden and unexpected spikes in performance. They may be positive or negative. And, they are typically short-lived. They occur as quickly as they disappear.

Because of the brevity of outliers, many marketers largely disregard these occurrences. After all, why dig deep into a change that is over as soon as it starts? Plus, some outliers are just unexplained anomalies.

However, there are other instances where outliers are significant. A sudden negative or positive spike in performance can be a sign of a much larger trend still brewing beneath the surface.

Also, looking at extreme highs and lows of your metrics can return useful insights. For instance, an ad group with an extremely low level of clicks may signal a problem with your ad copy or keyword relevance.

Why You Need A Tool Like PPC Signal

Not certain if PPC Signal is a fit for your business? When it comes to PPC management tools, it shouldn’t matter how big or small your Google Ads account is or how many accounts you are managing. PPC Signal is a tool that any advertiser can utilize to improve campaign performance.

If any of the following cases sound familiar, then PPC Signal is the perfect tool for your PPC marketing strategy.

You Have Too Much To Do, And Too Little Time

Digital marketing is a heavy workload. Even if your only job responsibility is managing PPC campaigns, we’re still talking about several hours’ worth of work every day. It takes a lot just to keep your strategies up and running.

Where do you find the time needed to review the account, locate possible areas of improvement, make those improvements, review the impact of those changes and repeat this process again and again?

You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time!

PPC Signal is designed to do the heavy lifting when it comes to optimization. It observes your data and returns possible areas of interest, without you having to lift a finger. This saves time and allows you to focus on improving campaigns, instead of finding out what is and isn’t working. PPC Signal does that for you! All you have to do is prioritize changes and take action.

You Have A Complex Account With Multiple Campaigns And Many Hands On Deck

Once upon a time, you had a small PPC account with only a handful of campaigns. Now, your PPC strategy has grown several times over. You have a bigger budget, which means more campaigns and keyword targets. You even have an entire team of advertisers dedicated to managing and optimizing all of the moving parts!

Despite all of this scaling, management is still an issue. The larger the account, the more complex it becomes. That complexity grows at a rate faster than you can scale, eventually hitting a point where you need a tool like PPC Signal because manual management just isn’t possible anymore.

While having a larger budget opens more doors, it also means that you have more at stake to lose! You don’t want to waste thousands on poorly optimized campaigns. PPC Signal turns your team into an optimization machine, with everyone focusing on making positive course corrections that achieve better and better results!

You Are Advertising In A Very Competitive Market

Competition in PPC is something that every advertiser must learn to deal with. Your competitors will dictate how much you need to spend to land impressions and clicks and how much attention your business gains from ad messages.

For some accounts, competing with big spenders isn’t possible, which means marketers need to develop creative counter-strategies, such as bidding on valuable, but less competitive keywords.

That said, some markets are more competitive than others. More people are advertising for law firms than for custom quilts. If you’re operating in a particularly competitive PPC market, then PPC Signal is a great solution.

PPC Signal will find those creative counter-strategies, while also detecting when competitor strategies are impacting your own results. The more signals you act on, the more your competitive advantage will grow. Soon, it will be an insurmountable difference that even the big-fish rivals can’t overcome.

Exploring Insights In PPC Signal

The PPC Signal process can be broken down into four easy steps that make optimization a simple and efficient task. This section will look at how the PPC Signal process works, including screenshots of how easy the interface is to use and understand. This will give you a clearer picture of the impact of applying this tool to your own daily marketing activities.

Step 1: Insight

The PPC Signal monitors your campaign data and looks for noteworthy changes. In other words, it looks for components that are performing better or worse than what is expected, or what is the “norm.” It compares current performance and historical data to discover trends, shifts and outliers that it deems significant.

The PPC Signal dashboard lists all of the observations that the tool makes. Each insight can be clicked on to see further details. With this system, all of the most important changes to your account rise right to the surface.

Each observation includes the campaign, ad group and keyword being affected, as well as a description of the observation. You can see an example of what a signal looks like from the screenshot below.

Step 2: When Did It Happen? How Significant Is The Change?

Once you’ve clicked on insight, you’re given the option to explore it further.

Clicking this explore button shows you a trend chart of the observation. This allows you to see the insight across a longer period of time. This timeline view will show when the change started to occur, whether it has repeated in the past and how significant the difference is alongside other shifts.

Step 3: Reasons Behind The Change

Now that you know the timing and severity of the change, it is time to analyze the reasons behind this change in performance, whether positive or negative. If your conversions have dropped or increased significantly in the past week, PPC Signal will analyze the data to find possible reasons why this has happened.

You can also add other metrics to the chart to see how this observation is impacting your other key performance indicators. In the below example, conversions are being compared to top impression %.

These two metrics share a close relationship and the performance line appears to be following a repeating pattern. By comparing and contrasting metrics, you can quickly get to the bottom of the signal and find the fortunate and unfortunate dips in performance.

PPC Signal also allows you to switch from the chart view to a data table by clicking the icon in the top-right.

With this tabular view, you can further infer that an increase in top impression share is giving you good conversions. A 75% top impression share results in 3 conversions. When impression share hits the 60% threshold, conversions jump to 0.

Thanks to this signal, you’ve figured out the factors that are causing your performance to suffer. By taking action, which will be addressed in the next step, you can avoid this risk to your performance.

Step 4: Take Action

The final step in the PPC Signal process is to put what you’ve learned from the tool’s observation into action. You know what’s happening, you’ve figured out why it has happened, now it is a matter of finding a solution.

PPC Signal doesn’t leave you hanging at this step! In fact, PPC Signal recommends the next step to take. You can change bids, pause the campaign if not performing well, and perform other actions right in the PPC Signal interface. This eliminates the need to flip back and forth between the tool and your Google Ads dashboard.

This is where a lot of PPC management tools stop. They give you the insights, but not a solution or next-steps to resolve the risk. PPC Signal ensures that you have assistance every step of the way, from detection to action.

Wrap Up

Staying on top of your campaigns at all times is not easy. Optimization is a relentless process that requires you to consistently uncover insights and make improvements and course corrections to your campaigns. It’s a tedious, painstaking process, but it doesn’t have to be.

PPC Signal makes change and growth part of your daily routine. Not only does the tool detect significant shifts in your account that are worthy of attention and further exploration, but it also provides actionable advice on how to proceed.

Finally, campaign optimization is simple and efficient, instead of complex and tedious.