Categories
Knowing how to spend your marketing budget is the key to success.
You need to make intelligent, strategic decisions on how to invest your budget to maximize your results.
Intelligent and strategic decisions need to be made based on data, not gut feelings, opinions or assumptions.
These approaches are not backed by evidence, which means it’s impossible to guarantee their accuracy. In other words, it’s easy to let gut feelings lead you astray, but data will rarely misguide.
This discussion will look at the data-driven approach for how to spend a marketing budget. With this method, you’ll optimize every dollar spend and maximize your PPC ROI!
Let’s get started.
Before we break into the specifics of adopting a data-driven approach to your marketing budget, let’s first discuss why you should choose data instead of assumptions.
Data provides evidence behind your decisions and various options. Instead of guessing the best course of action, data shows you the right path to take.
Assumptions are subjective and based on inaccurate details (past experiences, gut feelings, etc.), which is not how you want to run your business.
This is especially true in PPC because you’re directly paying for keyword clicks. If you don’t rely on data to determine which search terms you invest in, you will struggle to utilize your budget properly.
You don’t want to allocate your budget blindly. Instead, you want to rely on data to find the best possible investments.
The only time it is acceptable to rely on assumptions or gut feelings is when you lack data. That said, you should keep in mind that any decisions made using opinions are volatile and likely won’t lead to great results.
Decision-making accuracy is not the only benefit of a data-driven approach to marketing and budgeting. There are many reasons to abandon decisions based on guesses or gut feelings.
Time is the most commonly cited reason behind some businesses relying on gut feelings over data.
These businesses mistakenly feel that collecting, analyzing and processing data for decision-making is too slow to be valuable.
“Decisions have to be made fast and aggressively,” they’ll tell you.
There’s some truth to this sentiment. Data can be complex and tedious to work with, but only if you try to approach it manually.
With the right tools and techniques, data analysis becomes much more efficient. You can even automate the process with the proper artificial intelligence solutions!
Removing the hassle associated with data analysis saves time because you aren’t running down bad leads or ideas.
Instead, you have complete clarity of the best paths to take.
Your business markets itself to many different types of audiences . Even a relatively niche product has multiple audience segments.
Identifying these small groups within your larger audience is crucial to your marketing success. It allows you to interact with each customer personally, instead of sending universal messages to all audiences.
After all, certain groups of customers may have drastically different interests or needs. Segmentation ensures you are hitting these targets correctly.
With all of the data available, more of your customers are expecting personalized experiences. This means offers, products, messages and other tactics that you specifically cater to them.
If you aren’t using your data to segment your audiences, you’ll fail to consistently deliver relevant ads to prospective customers, which will hurt your marketing performance.
Data doesn’t just help you put the best foot forward in your marketing; it also ensures that you continue to deliver exceptional experiences to customers.
Remember, audience behaviors and interests are going to change over time. Sometimes, they’ll even change overnight!
If you want to continue to engage them with your brand experiences, you need to stay on top of these changes and adjust your strategies accordingly.
Data is vital in detecting customer trends and knowing the best ways to act.
Otherwise, your experiences may grow stagnant, making customers more likely to defect and join your competitors.
Similar to developing better experiences, the data-driven approach to your marketing budget will also help you create more vital products.
Again, it’s about listening to your customers through the data and understanding their current needs and interests. Then, making necessary adjustments.
Each customer-brand interaction creates valuable data into what’s working and what isn’t.
For example, if your #1 best product last month starts to decline rapidly in sales, you have to swiftly analyze the data and discover the reasons behind this dramatic shift.
Is there a new, better product? Do people no longer need this item? Is there a defect or malfunction that’s causing negative sentiment?
Data answers these questions and more and enables you to always deliver the best products and services to your customers.
Modern marketing takes place across many different channels. PPC ads are just one tactic that you utilize to reach prospective customers.
Social media platforms, email, organic search results and many other strategies are essential components of your marketing strategy.
All of these parts need to be managed to deliver a cohesive marketing experience. Each channel needs to fit your brand and help you achieve your goals.
The problem with the multi-channel approach to marketing is it creates more stuff, for lack of a better word, that you need to track and monitor.
It also creates more data that needs to be analyzed. Through this analysis, you’ll be able to see which channels and strategies are the best and worst of the bunch.
Then, you can allocate your budget and time more appropriately. If a channel isn’t producing returns, you can stop spending money there and allocate those funds elsewhere.
Knowing how to spend marketing budget and market with a data-driven approach is a valuable lesson. Making this transition to a data-driven organization is not without its challenges.
There are three lessons to keep in mind to successfully adopt a data-driven approach.
At its core, data analysis is about finding patterns and correlations between different data points. There are various types of patterns that can appear in your data and each one helps tell the story behind all those numbers and figures.
For instance, let’s say the following line chart depicts your PPC conversion numbers.
You can see that performance was reasonably steady in the past, but now it is slowly increasing over the last 5 points. This is known as a trend.
This pattern lets you know there is a series of data points trending above or below what’s expected or “normal.”
Another example of a data pattern is an outlier. Unlike a trend where a series of data points perform a certain way, an outlier is a single point that falls well outside the rest of the data.
Outliers help you find extreme values in your data. These patterns can clue you into significant risks or opportunities.
Becoming data-driven takes time. It is a substantial change in behavior and decision-making for your organization.
During the transition, you may find yourself slipping back into your old ways of using gut feelings.
Or, you may only be partially following the data-driven approach. For example, you may be using data to confirm or deny your gut feelings.
While this is not inherently a bad strategy and you should use data to back any move you make, it’s failing to utilize your data completely.
You’re only using data when it supports your assumptions or opinions. This means that you’ll fail to detect other patterns that don’t align with this existing belief.
To ensure a proper data-driven approach for how to spend your marketing budget and optimize your campaigns, you should be able to tie every decision you make back to your data and insights.
If you can’t find a connection in your data, there is not enough evidence to support the decision.
No one likes working with raw data. A giant spreadsheet can be a paralyzing wall of numbers to “read” and analyze.
This is precisely why some businesses will ignore data completely. In its raw form, it’s too messy and tiresome to work with and analyze.
It’s not a matter of personal preference; it’s science. Your brain doesn’t respond as effectively to raw numbers or text as quickly as it does with visual information.
This is where we get the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.”
Research shows that visual information is 60,000 times faster to process for the brain. Plus, it’s easier to recall visual information and it stays with you for longer.
To make your data more engaging and easier to work with, you need to visualize your results with charts, diagrams and other visual tools.
When you can see a data visualization, it’s much faster and easier to detect patterns and actionable insights.
You can physically see noteworthy shifts, trends and other patterns!
As we’ve mentioned, manual analysis is a slow and troublesome affair. Yet, it is necessary to become a data-driven organization.
Luckily, it doesn’t have to be so tedious. With the right tools, the challenges of data analysis are greatly diminished.
Thanks to systems like PPC Signal, you can even automate the most time-consuming aspects of data analysis.
This enables you to learn how to spend your marketing budget correctly, using data.
Let’s look at the PPC Signal system in action.
PPC Signal is a PPC campaign performance optimization and management tool. It’s designed to simplify your PPC data through marketing AI and machine learning algorithms.
With this sophisticated technology, the system automates analyzing and detecting noteworthy performance changes across your PPC accounts and campaigns.
That means you don’t have to scour your spreadsheets and databases for insights by hand. The system automatically discovers patterns and insights and presents them to you on the PPC Signal dashboard.
Essentially, PPC Signal is an early warning alarm system for any positive or negative trend, shift, outlier, anomaly, etc., that hits your Google Ads account.
Not only does this save you the time of having to analyze the data manually, but it also gives you swift insights on current changes to your campaigns.
This speed means you can act faster than competitors to seize new opportunities or negate potential risks.
When you first access the PPC Signal tool, you arrive at your main active alert dashboard. This is where the system collects and presents all of your active alerts.
Each signal is a complete insight that includes critical details to understand the change to your PPC performance:
This is far more information than many other “automated insight” tools offer. While these PPC optimization software solutions claim to deliver automatic insights, they only provide basic insights with little value or activity.
While these insights may help you learn about changes to your campaigns, they fail to provide you with the complete picture.
Without every detail included, you have to spend your own time and resources finishing the analysis to complete the insight.
PPC Signal gives you verified, complete insights that are ready for action. There’s no additional analysis or work required.
All you have to do is decide which signal to act on and how to resolve or capitalize on the insight.
You’ll notice in the sample dashboard screenshot that there are 21 active signals. That’s a manageable number, but a larger account may have hundreds or even thousands of alerts active at one time.
PPC Signal includes several filtering options to help make this number more manageable. After all, you don’t want to see every change that hits your Google Ads account.
What you really want is to see the changes to your Google Ads account that matter most and pertain to your company’s unique goals and marketing objectives.
For instance, if your goal is to optimize your PPC campaigns to maximize conversions, you want to focus on signals that involve your conversion metrics first.
With PPC Signal’s filtering settings, you can remove any alert that doesn’t relate to conversions. This helps you zero in on the most important performance changes hitting your account, whether negative or positive.
Every insight on your PPC Signal dashboard can be expanded and explored further.
Once you click Explore, you arrive at a new screen loaded with helpful features to aid you in deciding how to act on the information given.
As we covered, visualizing the data is an extremely advantageous way to see what’s happening behind the numbers.
The chart shown in this expanded view is interactive and allows you to see the data in question. You can also add other metrics to the mix and see how the signal affects other parts of your campaigns.
By adding different metrics to this chart, you can see the complete view of the change. It also helps you understand the correlations between certain metrics and how even a slight change can create a significant ripple effect.
The other notable feature is the Take Action button.
With this feature, you always have a follow-up activity for every signal that hits your screen.
If you don’t know how to resolve a risk or seize an opportunity, this is a great Google Ads tool to use. It suggests what a next step action might be to handle the insight.
The PPC Signal system is designed to make daily growth a possibility. It’s as easy as accessing the dashboard, selecting which signals to explore, and taking action.
By simplifying the entire analysis and PPC optimization process, you no longer have to spend days extracting a single insight.
Now, they are hand-delivered to your email’s inbox and always available on the PPC Signal dashboard.
When you commit to resolving even just a small number of active signals each day, you build an unbeatable competitive advantage.
In other words, progress doesn’t add incrementally; it grows and builds off itself. For example, if you improve 1% each day for a year, the incremental mindset would assume that your year-end growth would be 365%.
In reality, your growth would be 3,778%. It’s the law of exponential growth. Your progress grows faster the more positive steps you take forward.
If you commit to making steady, positive progress using the PPC Signal system, you can build this steady, exponential growth for your PPC accounts.
Competitors won’t be able to compete by simply investing more money into their accounts because the foundation of your advantage is time.
Data provides evidence behind your decisions. Instead of making choices blindly, you have facts and figures that back each move you make. This enables your team to consistently make positive changes to your company and strategies, thereby building steady growth and success.
Decisions made using intuition are subjective. They are based on intangible things like gut feelings and past experiences. On the other hand, data-driven decisions use facts and figures as concrete evidence to explain why each move is made. This means that data-driven decision-making is far more accurate and consistent.
Using data to make decisions has several benefits compared to an opinion or assumption-based approach. When you use data to drive your actions and decisions, you make strategic moves with greater efficiency and accuracy. This allows your business to grow and progress towards its goals steadily, instead of the one step up, one step back approach of intuition-driven decision-making.
Your marketing budget is a precious commodity, just like your time. Both are finite and directly tied to your success as a PPC campaign manager.
In other words, knowing how to spend advertising budget and how to spend your time are crucial to running and maintaining high-performing campaigns.
The best approach to PPC campaign management and budget optimization is the data-driven method.
With the data-driven method, you utilize the wealth of information and metrics produced by your campaigns to inform your budgeting and marketing decisions.
Thus, every choice you make is backed by verified evidence, instead of subjective assumptions and guesswork.
Despite the obvious benefits of the data-driven approach to handling your marketing budget, many businesses shy away because of the hardships of data management.
Luckily, PPC Signal is the perfect tool for dispelling any apprehensions or concerns you have about adopting a data-driven approach to budgeting and PPC management.
Its sophisticated AI system makes it fast, simple and easy to grow your PPC campaigns every day, with little-to-no manual analysis required.
That’s a competitive edge you can’t beat!
How much did you enjoy this article?
We will help your ad reach the right person, at the right time
Actionable insights discovered for you. Now you can do more in less time.
PPCexpo Keyword Planner will help you align your keywords with the customers’ intent.
Frequent audits will help you optimize your PPC campaign for success.
Visualizations give you the ability to instantly grasp the insights hidden in your numbers.
Experience the new revolution in reporting … click your way to insights, don’t scroll.
Calculate the number of combinations in your PPC campaign. It may surprise you.
Related articles
A landing page is a web page designed to drive specific actions. Learn the essentials of creating high-converting landing pages in our guide.
ROAS calculation can help you evaluate every PPC campaign's performance so that you know which of your campaigns are converting the best.
Discover the marketing lifecycle stages and how they shape customer relationships. You’ll understand their role in driving customer engagement and retention.
