Keyword Performance Report to Detect Expensive Keywords That aren’t Converting

In the PPC field, keywords make the difference between having a winning or losing strategy.

Keywords dictate everything — who sees your ads, where they appear, how much you pay for clicks and the value of your resulting site traffic.

A keyword performance report enables you to evaluate the quality of your search term targets, specifically how they contribute (or detract) from your ROI.

By conducting a keyword performance analysis, you can detect expensive keywords that aren’t leading to valuable conversions, while simultaneously discovering new search terms that customers are using to find businesses like yours.

In this discussion, we’ll explore navigating keyword performance report and how to make smarter decisions about the search terms you add to your campaigns.

Let’s dive in.

How Can A Keyword Performance Report Help You?

Keywords are the building blocks of your PPC campaign strategies. Thus, it’s vital that you pay close attention to their performance and how they positively or negatively affect your returns and business goals.

The real challenge of managing your keywords is tracking performance changes in real-time. Several factors will impact keyword performance and cause your campaign metrics to fluctuate.

If you cannot detect these fluctuations swiftly, you can easily overpay for clicks and waste your valuable ad budget.

Keyword performance report offer this real-time insight and present data in straightforward, easy-to-comprehend ways.

Here are some examples of helpful keyword performance reports.

You can find more PPC Reports here.

Why Is PPC Keyword Performance Analysis So Crucial?

Keyword performance is constantly moving up or down. Your best keywords this month may not be so popular next period.

Considering the impact of keywords on when/where your ad placements appear and your costs, it’s vital to track their performance.

This section will break down the various reasons why keyword performance analysis is so crucial.

Budgeting And Forecasting Of Ad Spend

Optimizing your PPC campaigns is essentially the process of maximizing your ad results for the size of your budget.

For instance, if your ad budget is $1,000, your objective is to produce the best results for that amount.

PPC keyword performance analysis enables you to see how you spend your budget across your various campaigns and keyword targets.

It’s about seeing where your money is actually going.

You can identify the keywords, ad groups and campaigns that are consuming the bulk of your budget.

You can use this same data to predict your ad costs in coming weeks/months. With this Google Ads forecasting, you can plan and make any appropriate changes before running into budget problems.

Increasing ROI

Once you know where your budget is going, the next step is gauging how well your money is performing for you. Are you generating solid returns, or is there room for improvement?

ROI is a standard measure that you can use to analyze your ad strategies’ overall health and profitability. The higher your ROI, the better your budget utilization. You’re making much more than you’re spending.

By analyzing keyword performance, you can detect your most and least profitable keywords. Then, you can funnel budget away from your low-performing keywords and towards the ones generating the most returns.

When you have to report your advertising results to stakeholders or clients, ROI is one of the primary figures you bring to the conversation. This is a metric that is used in all facets of business, not just advertising.

Clients and stakeholders are less concerned with impressions, clicks, etc. They want to know how your ad campaigns are impacting the bottom line.

With a keyword performance report, you have a great tool to deliver your ROI results.

Achieving PPC Campaign Goals

Every business has its own goals and your PPC campaigns are designed to help complete these objectives.

Aside from cost-related metrics, you also want to analyze your key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure that your campaigns are helping you achieve your goals.

For instance, if you want to increase revenue with your ad campaign, you want to focus on detecting the converting versus non-converting keywords.

Keyword performance analysis helps distinguish high-performance from low-performance targets, just like it does for your costs.

By studying your keyword performance reports and making adjustments when necessary, you ensure that your campaigns are always heading in the right direction — towards completing your marketing and business goals.

Learning About Your Customers

How and what people search gives you insight into what customers care about and their preferences.

This knowledge serves you beyond the PPC space. You can use it to inform your entire marketing strategy.

For example, let’s say you run a car dealership. Your keyword performance report will reveal the types of brands, models, features and other details that prospective customers most commonly search on Google.

In turn, these insights help you learn about your business from the customer side. It can help you develop better products and strategies to meet their needs.

It’s information that is usable across your business. Marketing, sales, customer support, public relations, SEO, PPC and many other areas of your company benefit from knowing more about your customers.

Why Overly Expensive Keywords Are Killing Your Performance?

You must be thinking, How To Detect Them With Keyword Performance Report?

PPC marketers often miss the mark with expensive keywords because their performance blinds them. The danger is that high metrics can cause you to overlook the costs.

In short, just because a keyword is generating lots of clicks and even a few conversions, it doesn’t guarantee its value. You have to look very carefully at the costs compared to the performance.

In most cases, overly expensive keywords are best left alone for a few reasons.

• Low ROI: If you’re paying a lot for each click, it’s harder to get a high ROI. You may even end up having a negative return, if you aren’t careful.
• Eats Through Your Budget: On top of low ROI, expensive keywords quickly dry up your budget. A few clicks on high-cost keywords and you’ll have little money left for your other PPC targets.
• Competition: High costs for keywords are typically caused by heavy competition. The more competitors there are, the more bids there are, which spikes the CPC amount. Increased competition means you may be continuously battling for the coveted top ad rank.
• Generic: Often, expensive keywords generate high levels of competition because they are generic and appeal to many different types of businesses. The drawback is that generic keywords rarely lead to steady conversions.

There are several keyword performance reports that can help you detect overly expensive targets in your campaigns.

For instance, the Budget Planned vs Consumed report provides several helpful charts detailing your spending. Here’s an example:

With this chart, you can find the keywords consuming the majority of your budget.

Other reports, like the keyword bid increase report or cost analysis report, are also helpful in identifying too expensive keywords.

Tips To Make Keyword Performance Analysis Easier

With constant changes always threatening your keyword performance, you have to perform keyword performance analysis consistently.

Naturally, this gets tedious pretty quickly. It’s manageable if you have one or two campaigns and only a handful of keywords. However, when your account starts to grow to include more campaigns and keywords, it becomes less manageable.

Managers need to find ways to make analysis easier. Here are a few tips to get you started.

Always Consider Your Goals

You want to prioritize your keyword performance analysis efforts based on your goals.

In other words, you want to find the campaigns, ad groups and keywords that offer the most progress towards these objectives. Optimizing these parts will provide the most significant rewards.

Without taking the time to consider your goals, it’s easy to do more analysis than needed. You’ll end up trying to optimize everything at once, instead of working out the parts that actually matter.

Take the time to evaluate your goals and KPIs and use that knowledge to guide your analysis projects.

Utilize Reports

A keyword performance report dramatically simplifies your data. You can see keyword performance from several angles in one interactive PPC report.

When you have a complete, visualized view of your keyword performance data, it provides all of the context you need to discover actionable insights.

These insights directly improve your PPC strategies by giving you the knowledge you need to make intelligent, data-driven decisions about your keyword targeting.

You’ll quickly locate the keywords that are working in your favor and against it. With that insight, you can pause damaging keywords and allocate more funding to ones exceeding expectations.

Focus On Quality Scores

Quality Score is one of the most significant measures of keyword performance for several reasons.

• Google uses Quality Score to determine ad ranks.
• Quality Score is a measure of how good or bad your ad experiences are to users.
• High Quality Scores result in lower CPC values and typically higher CTR.

Quality Scores are calculated using a variety of factors, including expected CTR, ad relevance, landing page experience and more.

An easy way to start your keyword performance analysis is to scan your keywords for any that have low Q-Scores. This is an immediate clue that something isn’t working.

Raising low Quality Score keywords will positively impact your entire PPC strategy!

Look For Extreme Highs And Lows

Another tactic for simplifying your keyword performance analysis is to look for extreme highs and lows in your data.

Essentially, you’re looking for anomalies. These are keywords that have a value way above or way below what’s expected or normal.

These are the most immediate and most obvious potential risks and opportunities to your keyword performance — the smoking guns.

When you chart your data, anomalies stick out like a sore thumb. Any significant spike or dip in metric performance should be examined closer.

For instance, if a keyword has an extremely high number of clicks, you want to look closer.

Clicks cost you money, so if you aren’t frequently turning those clicks into conversions, it may be worth pausing the keyword to stop your budget drain.

Automate When Possible

Even with tips and helpful methods for performing keyword analysis, it’s still an arduous and often complex task.

After you’ve resolved the smoking guns and resolved your extreme highs and lows, what do you do next?

Again, manual analysis can work when your account is small, but suddenly your campaigns grow and you’re managing thousands of keywords at once.

Automation helps you detect the less-obvious changes in your keyword performance. Plus, it alleviates many of the cumbersome parts of the analysis process.

Google Ads includes some basic automation tools, like rules that help you raise keyword bids based on specific parameters.

That said, you should also invest in more advanced PPC marketing automation tools. These solutions will significantly reduce the stress and hassle of keyword performance analysis.

You’ll spend less time struggling with the data and more time improving your performance.

PPC Signal: Simplifying PPC Keyword Performance Analysis

PPC Signal is a an optimization tool designed explicitly for PPC optimization. It monitors all of your accounts, campaigns, ad groups and keywords and looks for meaningful changes in performance.

Essentially, it automates your keyword performance analysis. That’s a substantial time-saving bonus to you and your team. You can commit 100% of your time to creating positive keyword changes, rather than toiling with the data.

This section will look at how PPC Signal works and its many benefits to PPC advertisers.

What Does PPC Signal Look Like?

Each time you access PPC Signal, you’re brought to the main dashboard page that shows every active signal in your account.

What’s a signal? You can think of it as an alert for your Google Ads accounts, letting you know when performance has changed in some way or a component is performing unexpectedly.

Here is a sample of a signal detected with this automated system.

In this small window, you can see:

• What’s changing
• When the change started
• Whether the change is negative or positive
• How significant is the change compared to past performance
• Which areas of your account are affected by the change
• What the change looks like when charted

It’s a complete insight that you can quickly use to make informed, data-driven decisions to boost your performance.

If you tap the Explore button on any signal, you see a more detailed view of the data.

There are plenty of additional features on this screen. For instance, you can add other metrics to the visualization to see how this change has affected other metrics.

Also from this page you can view the data as a table, export it, zoom in on a particular section and more. PPC Signal even suggests a follow-up action you can take to resolve the risk.

Filtering Options Bring You The Data That Matters Most

As mentioned, larger Google Ads accounts have more data and keywords to track, making manual analysis an impossibility.

Marketers end up spending more time sifting through the not-so-important data, when they should be analyzing the stuff that matters.

PPC Signal alleviates this struggle with a plethora of filtering options. You can filter any of your active signals by:

• Account
• Campaign
• Ad group
• Keyword
• Device type
• Geography
• Hour of the day
• Metric
• Signal quality
• Signal type

These filters enable you to get right to the data you care about, whether it’s a specific campaign, changes to a key metric or otherwise.

You never have to sift through less-important changes to find the data and insights that align with your advertising goals.

Insights At The Keyword Level

PPC Signal is far from the only automated PPC optimization tool. However, it is one of the only options that allow you to see insights at the keyword level.

Most software tools give you broad insights into how your campaign is performing and what you can do better.

PPC Signal, on the other hand, works at the smallest levels of your campaigns. Thus, it’s an ideal tool for keyword performance analysis.

Using filters, you can get right to individual keywords and see how their performance is changing.

When you leverage PPC Signal alongside your keyword performance report, it’s a double win. Your reports will allow you to see performance shifts (whether positive or negative) at the account or campaign level.

Then, PPC Signal helps you zoom in on the exact keywords behind the problem.

Consistently Improve Keyword (And Campaign) Performance

The beauty of PPC Signal is you never have to lift a finger to receive actionable insights regarding your Google Ads account.

This enables you to consistently improve your keyword performance and respond to data changes in real-time.

While most of your competitors will be reacting to changes that have already occurred, you’ll proactively avoid risky keyword bids and capitalize on opportunities.

When you consistently improve your PPC performance, your growth grows exponentially. So, if you were to enhance keyword performance by 1% each day, your year-end growth would not be 365%, as one might expect.

It would actually be a colossal 3,778%.

The math is not 1% multiplied by 365 days. It’s 1% to the 365th power.

This is an unbeatable advantage that competitors cannot overcome by simply investing more into their strategies. It takes time, commitment and a steady increase in performance.

FAQs:

What is the importance of keywords in PPC?

PPC marketing works by selecting keywords to target and bid on against other businesses. When you win a keyword auction, your search ad will appear at, or near, the top of the results page when someone searches for the same words, or very closely related ones, on Google. Thus, keywords are fundamental in when your ads appear and how much you pay for your advertising.

Why is it important to include relevant keywords in your ad?

If you don’t include relevant, target keywords in your ads, it will be difficult to obtain top ad ranks. Google looks for relevant keywords when judging the quality of ads. After all, the search engine wants to put the best possible ad experiences in front of its users. To have relevant keywords in your ad you can sort out it with PPC Signal Keyword Analysis.

What are long tail keywords and why are they important for marketers?

Whereas a short-tail keyword may be one or two words, a long tail keyword is longer, like a phrase or question. These keywords are typically more specific, which can be valuable to PPC marketers. Specific searches have clear intent and make connecting customers to suitable offers or products much easier.

Wrap Up

Utilizing a PPC keyword performance report holds many benefits to marketers.

First, it simplifies your keyword data and allows you to look at your costs, KPIs and other crucial components from multiple angles at once. This is much, much faster than trying to analyze raw data in a spreadsheet.

Second, your keyword performance report is an exceptional delivery method for presenting PPC results to stakeholders and clients.

By leveraging both PPCexpo PPC Reports and PPC Signal, you can create a one-two punch for your campaign management.

PPCexpo’s wide variety of PPC performance reports will help you analyze and measure progress at a high level.

If performance changes unexpectedly, PPC Signal locates the cause and presents it to you as a complete, easy-to-understand alert.

Keyword performance analysis has never been more straightforward.