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Do you want to know something that Google will never admit to you about Google Ads? It’s the fact that Google Ads is exceedingly complex. Google goes to great lengths to have you believe the opposite; that advertising with Google is simple and easy.
Just make an account, pull together some relevant keywords, set your budget and alakazam! Your business starts seeing more website visitors and revenue. Does that sound like a familiar sales pitch?
If you’ve spent any time managing your own campaigns, then you’re already aware that this is not the truth. Sure, it is easy to start a campaign, but it is a far different story to run a successful Google Ads account.
To make matters worse, complexity grows right alongside your account. In other words, the bigger your account becomes, the harder it is to manage. Where do you even begin to optimize when you have 50 campaigns with 20 ad groups apiece and 10 keywords to every ad group?
That’s a lot of stuff to track and analyze!
When complexity goes unchecked, it becomes a detriment to your entire strategy. Suddenly, the routine act of checking your account status becomes a dread.
On this page, we’ll take a look at how complexity occurs in a Google Ads account and what you can do to minimize these complexities and rise above the challenges of managing a large PPC account!
PPC marketing is for all types and sizes of companies. And, each organization defines complexity in its own way.
For a large corporation, accounts are complex because of their sheer size. When you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to dedicate to advertising, the options are seemingly endless. It is a gift and a curse –more opportunities to explore means more time that must be dedicated to managing those efforts.
Small accounts are also not without their challenges. They are not complicated because of their size, but because of their limitations. There is far less room for error, which means these account owners have to be very precise with their strategies.
Eventually, small campaigns grow and they face the same complexity challenges as their larger counterparts.
Three primary factors contribute to the complexity of a Google Ads account. Understanding these sources of complexity helps to overcome the difficulties associated with handling a robust, complicated account.
The structure of your account is the first factor that leads to complexity. There is no one way to approach structuring a PPC account and everyone has their own idea about how to organize it.
You need to find what works best for your business because what works for one advertiser is not guaranteed to work for you.
Think about it: the best Google Ads campaign structure for a local advertiser will be drastically different from what an advertiser trying to reach a national or international audience needs. The same comparison can be drawn between a B2C business advertising to customers and a B2B advertiser striving for lead generation.
The point is simple: your account structure needs to work for you and your unique advertising needs!
That said, there are a few rules that every Google Ads user should consider when organizing their accounts:
The more time you can put towards your account’s organization, the better you will be prepared to handle complexity. The structure has a very definite impact on how easy your account is to manage.
A PPC account, even a small one, produces a lot of data. And, that data is growing and growing… and growing. The good news is the insights buried in this mass of information are helpful in how to run a successful Google Ads account.
This is no secret. Every digital marketer understands how important it is to analyze and dissect data to find new customers and increase sales.
It is easy to dig into the data and extract insights when you’re only managing one or two small campaigns. You can track changes and optimize performance from a simple spreadsheet. But, things start to get tricky when you have 20+ campaigns that are all generating scores of data.
When data hits the tipping point, manual analysis is no longer possible. That simple spreadsheet has exploded in size and suddenly includes thousands of rows of numbers. Such a large amount of data is too complex to analyze without a sophisticated tool.
You need to use your campaign data to predict upcoming changes and make course corrections that increase performance. But, to use that data, you need to overcome the complexity that comes with so much information.
Why is data such a problem? Data breeds complexity because of the number of combinations of dimensions and metrics that it produces. Again, it’s the idea that the larger your account is, the more possible avenues there are to take.
More combinations make it exceedingly difficult to find the right path towards improving your performance. Changes are always occurring and your job as a manager is to prioritize the changes that require your attention right away.
It’s about finding the metrics that matter and the dimensions that lead to relevant, valuable discoveries to improve performance and grow your campaigns.
When you manage several campaigns at once, it is normal to find yourself tracking changes across thousands of keywords. If you have 50 campaigns, each with 12 ad groups and every ad group has 5-10 keywords, that’s a lot of parts to monitor.
Now, let’s add in dimensions and metrics. You have 24 hours out of the day, 7 days of the week, across 4 device types and any number of geographical locations. Not to mention, there are several PPC metrics types that you can explore. Suddenly, your data has grown to hundreds of thousands of rows.
If you want to know which ad group generates the most number of clicks, at a certain time of day, on which device type and in what areas, you need to deal with a lot of different combinations to find your answer.
This is where having the right tools comes in handy.
When complexity occurs in a PPC account, it quickly leads to frustration. The individuals handling that campaign, whether a single manager or a team of marketers, begin to lose focus because the complexity becomes overwhelming.
At this stage, management becomes a toiling exercise on how to reduce complexity in the account. This is all time that should be spent on actually optimizing results and improving campaign performance. Instead, optimization starts to lag because the team is trying to dig themselves out of the overwhelming morass of a complex account.
And, that’s the best-case scenario. If you’re managing an account by yourself or with limited resources, the complexity of your campaigns may become so overwhelming that management is an utter terror.
In this scenario, managers begin to neglect routine optimization all together because there’s just too much to unpack to yield any actionable insights. It becomes paralyzing!
How do you combat this crippling paralysis? You need smart tools that bring insights to the surface, no matter how large or complex your account becomes.
You can access the combinations calculator from here
This concept of metric-dimensions combinations and their impact on the complexity of an account inspired PPCexpo’s Combination Calculator. This free tool allows any account owner/manager to determine the exact number of combinations in their campaigns.
In this respect, the tool can essentially be used to calculate how complex your account is. The calculator looks at campaigns, ad groups, keywords per ad group, device types, hours of the day, etc. and determines how many different possible combinations can be made from all of this.
There are two ways to use the Combination Calculator.
You can manually enter the information about your account. This means telling the calculator how many campaigns you’re working with, ad groups within those campaigns, the average number of keywords per ad group, total devices being targeted, locations, hours of the day, days of week and number of metrics.
As you enter the data about your account, you’ll see the number of combinations on the right-hand side change to reflect the new inputs. You can scroll down the list of combinations to see how the number fluctuates based on the number of dimensions. For example, how many combinations exist when looking at campaign, ad group and device type.
The manual method is excellent because you can immediately and directly see how adding or subtracting the number of metrics, dimensions or account components results in more or fewer combinations.
Here is an example of the manual calculator. In this screenshot, a manager is measuring how many combinations are in a single campaign featuring 10 ad groups, 15 keywords per ad group, targeting 4 devices, 20 locations, running 24/7, and tracking 10 metrics.
If entering your data in manually sounds too tedious, you can use the automatic Combinations Calculator. All you need to do is sign in to your Google Ads account. Then, the PPCexpo Combinations Calculator does the rest by gathering your account information and entering the data automatically.
This is not only a much faster approach but also a more accurate one.
No matter which approach you use, manual or automatic, you’ll save a lot of time than if you tried to calculate combinations with pen and paper.
Understanding the level of complexity in your account (i.e., the number of combinations) is a great start. However, there is still a looming problem of knowing how to manage and optimize a complex account. For that challenge, you need a smart tool like PPC Signal.
You can access PPC Signal from here.
PPC Signal is an AI-powered management tool that uses advanced algorithms and machine learning to automatically detect opportunities and risks in your account. No matter how complex or paralyzing your data is, PPC Signal supplies actionable observations about positive and negative changes occurring in your campaigns.
With these observations and signals, marketers can overcome complexity with ease and escape the dread of managing a very large account. The once tedious task of dissecting complex data to discover valuable and actionable insights is now automated.
Essentially, this allows PPC managers to zero in on the combinations and changes in their accounts that have the greatest importance. Thus, time dedicated to PPC management can be entirely spent on making improvements, instead of trying to overcome the account’s complex nature.
PPC Signal not only detects changes but even recommends how to take action so that you can improve performance. When you can make these improvements part of your daily routine, your advertising ROI will go from average to exceptional.
There are many techniques that you can deploy to help manage a large or otherwise complex PPC account. This section will explore these methods and why PPC Signal is the perfect tool for managing a complex PPC account.
Machine learning tools, like PPC Signal, are extremely valuable for media buying. Through complex algorithms, predictive analytics, and other machine learning applications, PPC Signal can increase the liquidity of your Google Ads account.
Liquidity in advertising is essentially the state of allocating your budget so that every dollar is flowing towards the most valuable impressions. This is exactly what you’re trying to achieve when you are optimizing your account.
By continuously detecting signals in your account data, the PPC Signal management tool can help you find the optimal audience for each ad and ensure that ads are targeted at the right time, location, price, etc. In turn, this makes optimization more efficient.
Increasing liquidity and efficiency helps alleviate complexity because it allows you to understand what truly matters in your account. When you know where to allocate money, you can ignore the other combinations that don’t provide results. Filter out the noise and focus on the valuable signals!
Thanks to an automated system like PPC Signal, rapidly processing all that complex data happens in real-time. This dramatically simplifies your optimization process and streamlines campaign management.
When PPC marketers use machine learning tools, it reduces the amount of manual effort required to set up and optimize Google Ads campaigns for success. Insights rise right to the surface, which allows you and your team to focus on improving campaign effectiveness instead of drowning in complexity.
You’re not handing over complete control of your campaigns to the automation tool. That’s not what a useful PPC management tool does. Instead, PPC Signal simply does the heavy lifting when it comes to the more tedious aspects of campaign management. This allows you to focus on the tasks that really require your business expertise and marketing skill.
It’s all about simplifying what it means to manage your campaign. The PPC Signal tool was largely built with the 1% improvement principle in mind. This is an approach to optimization that doesn’t try to go from start to finish overnight.
It’s not possible to capitalize on every opportunity and mitigate every risk all at once. You’ll burn out trying to accomplish this, especially when dealing with a complex account. Instead, you should aim to grow just 1% each day. This is a daily goal that is extremely manageable when working with an automation tool.
Over time, those 1% improvements will begin to build off of one another. Your growth will be multiplying and exponentially growing before you know it!
The value of this time-saving aspect of AI-enabled PPC management tools can really not be mentioned enough. Remember, you can always make more money, hire more staff, etc. But, you cannot create more time!
Any digital marketer will agree that time is a limited and valuable commodity. When you have more time in your schedule, the opportunities are endless. Doors begin to open and those creative wheels start turning.
This will make life as a marketer more enjoyable because you can use your skill set more appropriately. This is good! This is what marketing should be about –using your creativity and expertise to develop engaging, successful strategies.
Unfortunately, complex PPC campaigns often limit how much time there is for creativity and out-of-the-box strategizing. Not anymore! With PPC Signal quickly and efficiently handling the ever-changing data on its own, you have more time to focus on being strategic and creative. This means tackling tasks like developing client strategies, planning and testing new ads, making creative choices, and more.
The simple truth is that managing a PPC account is not as easy as it appears, especially for large account owners. However, when you can streamline the process with tools like PPC Signal and the Combinations Calculator, you have a much better grasp on what makes Google Ads complicated and how you can overcome the sometimes paralyzing complexity.
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