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We are sure you’ve heard the following:
“Don’t miss these essential insights.” “Are you getting the insights your PPC management needs?”
But what is the actual definition of a marketing insight?
If you’ve been alive in the past decade, you likely heard the word “insight” too many times to count. In fact, it’s becoming a favorite word among marketers in today’s world.
But what exactly does it mean?
The more people misuse the word ‘marketing insight,’ the more it’s turning into a cliché.
Insight is the combination of life/work experiences with systematically collecting and analyzing data. And data without added context isn’t valuable because it doesn’t show you what you should do next.
Simply put, a market insight is the discovery of a relevant, actionable, and previously unrealized reality about a target market as the result of data analysis.
The goal of insight in marketing is meeting your target audience’s actual needs and wants while simultaneously profiting. In other words, the best market insights examples offer value to your clients at the minimum cost possible.
This blog will walk you through 13 core insights and proven tips that actually work. These tips have helped many other PPC managers drive value for their clients.
Whether you’re new to PPC campaign management or a seasoned veteran, we hope you get a lot of value from the tips in this blog post.
Before we proceed, let’s make something clear. There is a difference between insights and actionable insights. The latter is what matters most to your management.
Insights are simply the answers you draw from your data after analysis and visualization.
Conversely, actionable insights cause action to happen rather than just merely answer a question. So it makes you rethink the situation and push you forward to find a new solution.
Nothing is boring like sifting through an ocean of data to get actionable answers.
So for an insight to qualify as actionable, it must be:
There’s a level of subjectivity when it comes to the relevance of insights. Deliver insights to the right person at the right time.
Sometimes insights-based metrics can highlight interesting anomalies but lack sufficient details to drive immediate action.
Less experienced PPC managers think they’ve finished the job after launching ad campaigns.
This is further from the truth!
In reality, search engine marketing (SEM) management is less about marketing and more about managing your campaigns and continuously improving.
Yes, effective keyword targeting is incredibly important, but it’s an ongoing process!
Keep reading to discover 13 significant areas of Google Ads, you need to monitor and optimize continuously.
Key and timely insights into these essential areas (metrics+ dimensions) save the time needed to optimize campaigns for results. You’ll achieve healthier returns for your clients.
These 13 sources of insights are divided into 2 categories.
The first category is specific campaign metrics that require attention. The second category is made up of dimension variables.
Let’s dive in.
Although there are many metrics in PPC to explore but below are the one which you should not ignore.
Keep reading to uncover tips on each of the metrics and dimensions, which form the core of PPC management.
Whenever your ad appears on a search engine results page, it counts as an ad impression.
This is a top-of-the-funnel metric you need to drive conversions and revenues.
Without impressions, target audiences will not see your ads.
For this reason and several more, monitoring your impressions is vital. Low impressions signal a problem with your bidding strategy.
You may be bidding too conservatively for your clients’ ads to appear in front of target customers. Or your ads are not optimized to trigger search terms based on user intent.
Look at the time of day when assessing your impressions. If you aren’t seeing impressions after a certain time of day, it’s a sign that your budget is not enough.
So, your budget is running out too early. And your clients’ PPC ads aren’t placed after a certain time of day.
Impressions report is a wealth of insight about the behavior of the target audiences, including their search patterns. So, it’s a valuable source of keyword research.
Do your target audiences prefer desktop or mobile?
What hours of the day (HoD) are they actively searching for products and services?
Which day of the week (DoW) is performing incredibly well?
Look at the top impression share percentage metric, as well.
This metric shows you how often your ads list at the top spot. Higher percentages suggest that your ads are often out-ranking our rivals.
Impression share measures the number of impressions your ads actually received versus the impressions your ads could have gained.
So, it’s the number of times that your ads miss out on displaying for one reason or the next.
Analyzing impression share is a great strategy for identifying parts of campaigns that need a boost to reach the same level of success as your other PPC ads.
Impression share becomes a concern when it falls exceptionally low for a given keyword, ad group, or campaign.
So, if you’re uncertain what area of your campaign to focus on, this is a great place to start with.
When analyzing impression share data, look at every level and filter. For example, monitor impression share at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level. And, remember to compare impression share between different dimensions like match types, devices, keywords, etc for in-depth insights.
How can you maximize your impression share?
A click occurs when a user sees your ad (thereby creating an impression) and clicks the ad for more information and further action.
Clicks count is an indicator of a well-optimized PPC ad campaign.
If you have a high number of clicks compared to the number of impressions, then it’s a clear sign of compelling, enticing ad copy that can (and should) be replicated elsewhere in your campaigns.
A count of clicks that’s closer to impression share is an indication of a well-oiled PPC campaign.
On the other hand, if you have 1,000 impressions and no one is clicking, then something wrong with various variables, possibly:
So, low clicks mean grave danger. You need to take urgent action to optimize the ads for maximum engagement.
Clicks count is a powerful performance indicator. So, analyze clicks across different device types, times of day, and other dimensions for actionable insights.
This will help you acquire data-driven answers about your target audience, such as when and where they are most receptive to ad offers.
The screenshot from the clicks performance report above with respect to critical dimension variables, namely:
The insights generated provide you with a 360-view of the metric (clicks) in relation to other dimensions (HoD, DoW, devices, etc.).
Ignore these dimensions at your peril when analyzing click count.
Cost is the amount of money spent to drive clicks and impressions.
You have to spend money to make money, right?
But, if you spend too much and don’t see the correct returns, you might be burning money instead of making it.
Cost is particularly crucial, especially to PPC agencies with small and medium-sized businesses. You really need to stretch the minimal budget to the absolute limit.
Cost is such a crucial metric of your Google Ads performance. So, you need to analyze it from several dimensional angles, namely:
Costs are constantly changing. So, avoid overlooking this metric. In fact, it can make or break your clients’ PPC ad campaigns.
Pay close attention to how your ad performs on each device type and time of day or week.
If insights show clicks aren’t leading to conversions during a certain time frame or on a device type, it’s time to pause your ads to preserve your advertising budget.
You need to use this time to drill down on the money-draining problems causing costs to soar.
The same holds for keyword match types.
Broad match types can be costly because they put your ad next to tons of general searches, some of which are misaligned with user intent.
Besides, broad matches are known to draining ad budgets with irrelevant clicks.
While expanding the reach of your ads, focus on refining targeting as well to conserve your budget. Focus on areas where your cost is highest. And ask yourself whether the returns from these activities are worth the sky-rocketing costs.
Conversions are the final step in the PPC ad process.
The average conversion rate for Google Ads campaigns is 1.91% across all industries.
How does yours compare?
Optimizing the variables directly tied to increasing conversion rate results in a spike in sales. This means you could be generating more revenue by simply optimizing small details.
A conversion occurs when the target audience sees your ad, clicks it, and then performs the desired action. And the desired action could be a newsletter sign-up, a reservation, a call, app download, etc.
It’s absolutely a must to measure your conversions. Otherwise, you have no business managing your clients’ PPC ad campaigns.
Conversion is what matters the most to your clients. It’s the language they understand easily.
You have to polish your communication, close monitoring, and optimization of this metric.
When a user clicks your ad, you are charged by Google. This expense reflects as cost per click.
You want a majority of the clicks to convert. Google’s average clickthrough rate (CTR) across all industries is 1.91%.
Some niches, such as dating (6.05%), have higher than consumer products (2.41%). Ideally, you want a huge chunk of the CTR to convert to offset the cost of bounce rates.
Before you can begin analyzing your conversions, you need to enable conversion tracking. This is incredibly important.
Google Ads to access your clients’ landing page data to account for profitable clicks accurately.
Improper conversion tracking is arguably worse than no conversion tracking at all.
Your goal is to identify the best-performing dimensions with regard to conversion.
Answering these insightful questions is critical to optimizing your clients’ search ad campaigns for more conversions. You‘ll enhance your understanding of the target audience’s behaviors with regard to conversion.
Clickthrough rate, or CTR, is a ratio of your impressions versus clicks.
CTR is a closely watched metric because it relates closely to both clicks and impressions. And is one of the primary factors that Google uses to assign Quality Scores.
Your Google Ads Quality Score determines:
Google uses this crucial metric to measure ads based on relevance and quality to provide the best experience to search users. After all, the search engine doesn’t want bad ads infiltrating the search results pages.
Analyze CTR with respect to device type, time of day, day of the week, keyword match types, etc., for actionable insights.
CTR impacts both your Quality Score and avg. CPC. So, look at the Quality Score versus CTR versus cost per click for insights.
Your objective is to understand CTR performances.
Is there a particular hour of day or day of the week that attracts a better CTR?
Is there a particular device driving higher CTRs than others?
Which location has profitable CTR rates?
Answering these questions is crucial to enhance precision in targeting for more valuable and profitable clicks … clicks that matter.
Lower CTRs hurt your overall Quality Score. And this lowers your performance and results in losses for your clients.
It’s wiser to pause PPC ad campaigns with alarmingly lower CTRs, instead of repairing. For the problem might be so complex and time-consuming.
Rather than burning a hole in your clients’ pockets, take a moment, and breathe.
There’s no shame in retreating to the drawing board.
Cost per conversion report is different from the report based on cost metric. Whereas the latter looks at total money spent on PPC, cost per conversion measures the cost for customer acquisition.
CPC is calculated by dividing the total cost of clicks by total conversions.
Minimizing your cost per conversion is synonymous with enhancing your return on ad spend (ROAS).
An ROI of 200% and above is music to your client’s ears.
Measure your cost per conversion against dimensions, such as time, device type, keyword group, etc.
CPC varies considerably based on keyword match types. Broad keywords, in particular, cause costly spikes in your cost per conversion.
Quality Score is the relevance and quality of your PPC ads, keywords, and landing pages. It is scaled from 1 to 10.
A higher score increases your impression share and decreases cost per click (CPC) in the long term.
Google rewards PPC accounts with high Quality Scores with a lower cost per click (CPCs) and strategic ad placements. The ad platform looks at several key factors to issue a score, namely:
A lower Quality Score is a sign that something is likely wrong. It could be the messaging on your landing page (LP) is misaligned with the PPC ad.
Analyzing Quality Score at every level of your clients’ accounts allows you to quickly and easily identify problematic areas of your campaigns.
As shown in the screenshot above, you need to analyze your Google Ads Quality Score with respect to device dimensions. Why?
Devices are the first point of contact between your ads and target audiences. Devices with very low scores wreak havoc on Google Ads’ performance.
You need to stop PPC ads with lower Quality Scores to identify the money-draining variables dragging the metric downwards. Or Google will punish you by taking your money for unproductive ad placements.
Conversion rate is a percentage of conversions versus clicks count.
Let’s calculate the conversion rate:
Imagine you’re running a PPC campaign on behalf of a client. This campaign records 1,000 clicks and 50 conversions.
What would be your conversion rate?
50/1000*100% = 5%.
This implies that for every 100 leads in your campaign, only 5 convert into customers.
You want to be converting as frequently as possible.
The more clicks that convert, the better your CPC, CPA, and Google Ads ROI. You cut wastage in ad spend when your conversion rates start growing steadily.
To get a 360-degree view of from report of conversion rate, you need to analyze it with respect to:
Start with exact matches first before expanding when exploring keywords by match type,
Exact match keywords attract such a specific, targeted audience with higher conversion rates. Conversely, broad keywords attract a wider audience to expand your PPC ad reach. However, it attracts a lot of clicks that misalign with user intent.
A deeper understanding of this metric can help you optimize your clients’ sales funnel for a smoother customer journey.
ROAS is the metric that informs you what’s coming in from every dollar being spent.
In other words, it’s the revenue generated from every dollar spent on PPC.
One of the biggest drivers of ROAS is costs.
Keep costs down and conversion value up to achieve the recommended threshold of 200% or more.
Costs change by time of day and day of the week. So it’s important to monitor your ROAS from the same angle. Your ROAS is more robust at certain times of the day or week than others.
You need a time-of-day and day-of-week analysis to gain insights into the fluctuation of ROAS across time.
If you’re getting conversions from desktop and mobile, you need to compare the ROAS of each device type.
As mentioned earlier, broad match keywords often lead to irrelevant clicks with little-or-no value, affecting your ROAS.
So analyzing keywords with weak ROAS can help you identify very broad keywords that drain your budget for nothing.
In other words, ROAS analysis provides in-depth insights into match types that align with user intent.
Conducting a data-driven geographic analysis of your clients’ ads is an incredibly insightful tactic. You get to see the exact areas where your ads perform best and worst.
If you’re conducting local campaigns, this is a necessity.
Why?
You need to segment audiences that matter to you. Your clients’ products (and services) are not homogeneous. Others are tailor-made specifically for high-income neighborhoods, etc.
It’s very easy to blow your budget on low-performing or irrelevant areas if your campaigns are set up with geo-targeting.
So you must take a detailed look at unproductive locations costing you a lot to justify high spending.
While looking at the various locations targeted by your ads, look for areas with the most winners. Also, be on the lookout for geo-locations that your clients don’t target.
You may not even realize that you’re running ads in the wrong locations without tools offering you timely, actionable insights.
Imagine the loss if the problem remains undetected.
Your target audiences interact with ad content using different types of gadgets, such as tablets and smartphones.
You can’t use the same ad experience on each device type and expect similar, even close-to-similar results.
Talk of doing the same thing using the same strategy and expecting different results.
Some ad messages and landing pages work better on mobile screens, while others appeal more to desktop audiences. Conducting a device type analysis will show you what type of devices work best for your PPC strategies.
You want to analyze each campaign and ad message separately.
Again, some messages and landing page experiences will resonate differently depending on the device of the user.
For this reason, a device targeting analysis can give some clues as to how to optimize ad copy or landing pages for different screens.
Some of you conduct campaigns exclusively for a mobile or desktop screen. This allows them to personalize their ad content for respective devices.
When you analyze and understand how different device-type audiences interact with your ad content, you can create highly personalized campaigns and ad experiences.
Timing is incredibly important in search engine marketing (SEM) management.
The purpose of an ad scheduling analysis is to take all of the insights you’ve gained to optimize your bids based on the time (HoD and DoW) your target audiences are highly active.
Again, you don’t want your ad to run during the days and times when your target audience is inactive.
For example, you may find that, for whatever reason, your ads are successful on Monday mornings.
You generate lots of valuable conversions that drive hugely positive returns.
Sounds awesome, right?
Naturally, you want to maximize this high-priority time. So you need to create an ad schedule that boosts bids during this period. This will ensure that you’re getting maximum impressions for this particular day.
Essentially, you need to bid more for the times and days that are more productive than others. You may want to reduce bids for other stretches of time that don’t produce valuable results.
By the end of your ad scheduling analysis, you should have a thorough schedule of when to scale spend to maximize clicks and conversions.
Congratulations if you’ve reached this point. The metrics and dimensions mentioned above sound simple. Ignore them at your peril.
Optimizing all these dimensions and metrics sounds like a time-intensive task.
Yes. It is. We won’t lie to you.
It can take weeks and sometimes months to optimize the performance of metrics and dimensions to align with your goals and objectives.
Keep in mind machines are better at crunching numbers than humans.
Why do you outsource this task to AI-driven tools?
There are countless metrics + dimensions combinations you need to check. Essentially, your task to analyze metrics and dimensions grows with the complexity of your accounts. Imagine you have a campaign with 20 ad groups, each group consisting of 20 keywords. This campaign targets 4 device types over 50 geographic locations with ads running 24 /7.
It’s not hard to imagine how quickly such a campaign could turn into an incredibly complex maze.
There’s a FREE and popular tool that seasoned PPC managers use to measure the complexity of their client’s PPC campaigns. This tool is called PPCexpo Combinations Calculator.
This free tool allows you to determine the exact number of combinations in your campaigns.
The Combinations Calculator looks at campaigns, ad groups, keywords per ad group, device types, hours of the day, etc., and determines how many unique possible combinations can be made from all of this.
Another crucial point to note: You won’t be leaving your clients’ campaigns on autopilot. No.
There’s an easy-to-use and affordable AI-driven tool that can achieve all these with a single click.
Yes, you heard that right.
Once you integrate this tool with your clients’ Google Ads accounts, it will sift through your sea of data. And you’ll receive actionable insights classified as either risk or opportunity.
Here’s the best part.
You don’t need to scratch your head trying to decode the meaning of the insights. This tool crystallizes all insights into easy-to-understand opportunity and risk signals.
So, when you see risk signals, you know, it’s DANGER. Likewise, when you see opportunity signals, you know good things are coming, as the name suggests.
The name of this tool is PPC Signal.
PPC Signal is a highly affordable and easy-to-use SaaS tool that automates the time-consuming steps of detecting anomalies.
This cutting-edge tool achieves the above by collecting and analyzing data, identifying potential opportunities/risks, testing those insights for accuracy, etc.
This provides you with much more time to focus on actually enacting changes rather than continuously finding and testing possible ways to improve their efforts.
This tool conducts an exhaustive scan of your PPC data for outliers, shifts, and trends. And packages these alerts as risks and opportunities signals for easier understanding.
With PPC Signal, there is no reason to be apprehensive. You don’t relinquish any control over your strategies. Instead, this automation tool offers a way for you to utilize AI to make profitable decisions.
In this respect, PPC Signal empowers you to become data-informed but still human-driven.
When you receive a list of alerts from PPC Signal, it is entirely your free will to select the signals to pursue first. You can even filter this list by the campaign, device type, time, complexity, and other parameters.
Benefits OF Using PPC Signal
Congratulations! At this point, you’ve onboarded a marketing insight tool and integrated it with your Google Ads account.
Now what?
It’s time to address actionable insights once they are found.
The screenshot below shows how PPC Signal communicates anomalies to you.
The blue color represents opportunity, while the red color denotes risks.
Click on this link to sign up for PPC Signal 30-day Free Trial.
Let’s interpret an actionable insight as shown by the screenshot above.
There’s an anomaly in conversions. In other words, conversions are decreasing while cost per conversion (CPC) is increasing. In the past 7 days, conversions in the PPC ad campaign in question have been dipping. And the cost per conversion (CPA) has been soaring.
Assume this problem is left unsolved for another week or so?
How much money will the campaign flush down the toilet?
It’s time to dig deeper to know what’s happening at the detail level. You don’t want to leave anything to chance. This cost per conversion metric is labeled red (danger).
Essentially, this metric is creeping towards danger levels and needs to be corrected urgently. What could be the reason for soaring cost per action (CPA)?
The first place to start with to lower the cost per conversion is the conversion rate. The higher the conversion rate, the lower the cost in the long term.
Think of the factors to optimize to raise your conversion rate, such as Google Ads Quality Score.
It gets more interesting if you click the button labeled Explore, as shown in the screenshot above. The screenshot above is the user interface (UI) that pops after the present Explore button.
The Signal Type, as labeled on the top right side of the screenshot, is Risk.
Risk, as the name suggests implies disaster.
There’s a visual chart below to show the interaction between conversions and cost. In this particular case, the blue curve (conversions) is dipping while the gold curve is rising, as shown by the nodes (red).
There’s a leakage in this campaign. Users are not completing the user journey until the conversion stage.
Without insights into potential stumbling blocks, your PPC campaigns are bound to fail.
You need to keep watch for money-draining metrics and dimensions to maintain your current SEM clients and attract more.
We’ve provided you with a list of 10 metrics and few important dimensions to use as a roadmap to hunt for actionable insights. That’s where all the answers are hidden. Though the list is not exhaustive, it’s a good starting point, especially if you’re a young ad agency. You can adopt a tool like PPC Signal and explore your metrics and dimensions behavior in a totally new way which can give you good direction to fix your campaigns in a best way.
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