Optimizing Google Ads: How to Explore Hidden Opportunities and Risks in PPC Campaigns?

In today’s digital world, marketers have an abundance of data, analytics, and other tools at their disposal. Yet, it is surprising how many of these marketers fail to have a clear picture of how their online advertising efforts truly perform and impact their organization.

In one report, only a scant 9% of digital marketers reported they could accurately forecast the impact of a 10% shift in marketing spend. This means that the vast majority of marketers cannot correctly track what changes to their campaigns really mean or how to make adjustments to capitalize on opportunities or mitigate risks.

Often, PPC marketers find themselves reacting to trends, shifts, and other changes. These reactions occur after the fact when the damage has already been caused, or the value from a potential opportunity has begun to diminish.

Instead, marketers need to strive to be proactive in their management approach by making strategic changes at the time of a shift, or even before it occurs.

More and more marketers, across all industries and verticals, are beginning to implement smart tools to achieve a proactive management approach. These tools are designed to enhance campaign monitoring and provide better measuring of which channels and tactics lead to the greatest success.

The PPCexpo lineup of PPC management tools aims to help marketers better optimize their campaigns by staying on top of changes and doing so in a manner that saves time and effort. PPC Signal is one of the best PPC management tools in the PPCexpo lineup when it comes to making sense of the perplexing changes that are constantly occurring in your campaigns.

This post is a how-to guide on using the PPC Signal tool. It is helpful both for existing users and frustrated marketers that are looking for a new PPC management solution. Throughout this guide, you’ll see step-by-step how PPC Signal can help you grow your campaigns on an exponential level.

What Is PPC Signal?

You can access PPC Signal from here.

Through powerful machine learning algorithms, PPC Signal is able to monitor your campaigns and detect data signals that indicate a noteworthy change. AI technology is much faster and more efficient at detecting changes than manual methods.

Detecting change is a crucial piece of the PPC campaign management puzzle. You need to know how performance is progressing and whether there are any significant issues that need to be resolved or opportunities that can be seized.

When you aren’t paying attention to the changing landscape, you’re essentially flying blind.

The PPC Signal system analyzes the outcome of every change based on your historical campaign data. It labels each signal as either a risk or an opportunity.

• An opportunity signal means that, if you take action, there will be some amount of positive improvement created in your campaign. e.g. You got the signal that impressions are going high for the last couple of points or days. So now you have the opportunity here if you don’t spend too much on this campaign, there are still chances you are having good impressions with that less budget as well.
• A risk signal means that if you do not take action and resolve this potential issue, then there will be some amount of negative decline in your campaign. e.g Cost per conversion is increasing for the last couple of points or days this will drain your budget and this is the time where you have to look for bid management.

Timing is critical when it comes to detecting changes. You want to catch a change as early as possible and give yourself ample time to react and strategize. Plus, the sooner you act, the greater the impact. If it is an opportunity, quick action will maximize the gain. When a risk occurs, acting fast will minimize the potential damage.

By automating the monitoring and detection of these changes, PPC Signal allows marketers to focus all of their time and attention on implementing positive adjustments to their campaigns, even on a daily basis. When these changes can be continuously stacked, campaign ROI grows exponentially.

How To Analyze Signals In PPC Signal?

One of the design goals for PPCexpo and its tools, including PPC Signal, was to make it as intuitive and user-friendly as possible. Therefore, it is exceptionally easy to analyze the alerts provided by PPC Signal.

You actually have 4 ways you can examine signals:

i- Check For Consistency And Inconsistency Over A Period Of Time

Patterns tend to repeat themselves. Often, when analyzing a metric, you will find that the data reflects a similar pattern from the past. It can be very beneficial to compare your current metric to its behavior reported in the past.

The advantage of comparing current and past data is it gives you an idea of how much the data has varied, based on previous performance. This allows you to have better confidence in any conclusions or decisions regarding statistical significance.

While this shouldn’t replace more detailed calculations, you can typically see the significance of large changes over time.

ii- Check Vital Signs And Identify Patterns

Whenever you visit the doctor’s office, the practitioner first looks at your height, weight, blood pressure, vital signs, etc. Even if these steps have seemingly nothing to do with your reason for being at the doctor’s office, they are essential parts of the process. The same occurs when in the validation stage of data analysis.

You enter with a question, such as “Are users enjoying my awesome new landing page?” To answer this question, you need to check a number of smaller parts. Are there more users arriving at this landing page than previous ones? Have conversion rates increased? What sort of errors are occurring that are leading to bounces? Which audience targets are responding most positively to this page?

The PPC Signal system makes it effortless to monitor and check in on your campaign’s vital signs. Catching large, problematic obstacles or troublesome patterns will no longer be such a painstaking process.

iii- Pointing Out The Outliers

Outliers present an interesting dilemma for PPC marketers. Many marketers will set them aside as “unusual” or “anomalies.” However, they can be canaries in a coal mine that suggest more fundamental problems. It’s okay to categorize them as unusual, as long as you don’t forget to investigate why this data landed in the category in the first place.

For instance, if you notice a query with a far lower clickthrough rate (CTR) than the rest, it may reveal a problem where clicks on certain elements are not registering or being counter properly. Alternatively, you may discover an exceptionally high CTR that is occurring because clicks are being counted twice.

With PPC Signal, your outliers immediately rise to the surface. You can quickly and efficiently decide which anomalies require additional attention.

Getting Started With PPC Signal Demo

Are you interested in getting started with PPC Signal? Now that you know some of the advantages of analyzing data with PPC Signal, here are step-by-step instructions on accessing the free demo for this tool.

Where To Find PPC Signal

PPC Signal is a tool offered by PPCexpo. You can visit the homepage at PPCexpo.com, then hover your cursor over “Tools” on the top of the page and select “PPC Signal” from the dropdown menu.

Alternatively, you can visit the PPC Signal page directly by clicking this link. You’ll be brought to the PPC Signal tool overview. Your screen should look as follows:

To begin exploring PPC Signal firsthand, click on the blue “Demo” button on the screen.

Understanding The PPC Signal Interface

The demo button will bring you to the PPC Signal demonstration environment. Right away, you’ll receive some tips and insights into how the tool works. It’s a good idea to read through these six tips, as they will give you some helpful background knowledge.

Once you’ve cycled through these tips, your screen should look something as follows:

Extreme Left Navigation Menu

Accounts: Under the “Accounts” heading, you’ll see two options. “Register for beta” and “Demo.” This shows that you are currently using the demo version. We will revisit registering for the beta version of PPC Signal at the end of this guide on PPC Signal.

Modules: The “Modules” dropdown has three options: Audit, Recommendations and Observations. Currently, Audit and Recommendations are not available in the beta version.

The observations/signal tab shows the total number of observations, or signals, that PPC Signal has found in the targeted campaign, ad group, keyword, etc.

Left Navigation Menu

In the inner left navigation bar, you have different options for applying filters or checking analysis frequency. This really permits you to customize your signal results to fit with your unique needs.

Applied Filters: Under this heading, you’ll find which filters you’ve applied to your analysis. The default option is to filter results by “Signal Quality.” At any time, you can click to “clear all” filters you currently have applied.

You can also clear filters one at a time by hovering over the unwanted filter and clicking the close button, as displayed below.

Analysis Frequency: This section allows you to set how often you want PPC Signal to analyze campaigns, ad groups or keywords. You can choose to analyze data daily in the demo version. The paid version let’s you get even more detailed with your data by analyzing hourly.

Filters: There are many different filters that can be used to change how you analyze your PPC data. Let’s take a look at each filter individually to get a full picture of how you can customize your signal results and zero in on the insights that are most relevant to you and your marketing objectives.

• Campaigns: With this filter, you can choose specific campaigns to look at for insights. By default, this filter is set to include all campaigns. However, you may want to look at one particular campaign or exclude certain ones from your analysis.
  
• Ad Groups: Going one level deeper, you can also select which individual ad groups you want to include or exclude in your insights. Again, the default is to view data for all ad groups. You can select to only view insights for specific ad groups.
  
• Keywords: Within each ad group and campaign are several keywords that you’ve targeted. You can also filter out specific keywords. This allows you to analyze even the smallest components of your PPC accounts. Again, the default setting is to include all keywords, but you can select specific ones, as shown in the image below.
  
• Device Type: There are multiple types of devices where your ads may appear, such as desktop computers, mobile devices, tablets, etc. With this filter, you can look at data specific to users on certain devices. You can select one or multiple devices. If you leave the filter be, it will include all devices by default.
  
• Geo: With this filter, you can select specific geographical locations that your campaigns, ad groups or keywords target and see detailed insights and visualization of how each area performs. The default is for all of your geo-locations to be shown. Alternatively, you can choose to look at specific areas per the example below.
  
• Hour of the day: As a PPC manager, timing is everything. This filter allows you to look at your account components by specific hours of the day. You can choose the exact hours to look at, or leave the default to include all hours of the day.
  
• Metrics: There are a lot of different metrics when it comes to PPC management. PPC Signal organizes these metrics into three groups according to customer journey: top funnel, middle funnel and bottom funnel. At the top of the funnel, you have metrics like impressions, impression share and impression lost. In the middle funnel are clicks, CTR, average CPC, cost and more. Then, the bottom funnel group includes conversions, ROAS, conversion spend and more. You can choose specific metrics to focus on, or leave this filter alone and use the default setting to have all metrics included in your signals.
  
• Signal Quality: In the PPC Signal Demo, “Best” signal quality is already selected for you. You can also choose to include all signals, regardless of quality, or look at a specific level of quality. Signal quality is how confident or accurate PPC Signal has determined the signal is based on historical performance and other data.
  
• Signal Type: As mentioned earlier, PPC Signal classifies each alert or signal as either a risk or an opportunity. A risk suggests that inactivity could lead to negative performance, while an opportunity means that action will lead to a positive change. Information signals are neutral but provide insight that may be useful to the marketer. The default setting is for all signal types to be shown, however you can filter your results to only include a single type or exclude one type but display the other two.
  

Top Navigation Menu

Moving to the top navigation menu, you’ll find the PPC Signal logo in the top left corner. You can also see the total number of observations that PPC Signal has found based on your applied filters. In the opposite corner, you’ll find the settings icon.

When you enter the settings menu by clicking on this icon, you’ll see this screen:

Here, you find two settings tabs —General Settings and Metrics.

General Settings: Under the General Settings tab, you can choose to archive signals after a set number of days. By default, this option is set to 30 days.

You can also choose to hide the signal header on the details page. The default option is for this header to be shown. You can check the box if you’d like it to be hidden.

Finally, you can choose to hide the user guide and tips upon load. Once you’re familiar with the PPC Signal system, these tips won’t be helpful anymore and you can select to hide the tips.

Metrics: In the metrics tab, you’ll find all of the metrics that PPC Signal tracks. You’ll recognize these lists and how they are categorized by funnel position from the filters discussed in the previous section.

The metrics settings are designed to allow you to exclude metrics that are not relevant to your campaigns or marketing objectives and reposition metrics by funnel position.

The engineers behind PPC Signal understand that not everyone’s marketing funnel is shaped the same way. Similarly, not all metrics are important to every advertiser. Thus, this setting was created to give marketers the opportunity to shape their funnel metrics on how they’d like.

There are three phases to the marketing funnel that PPC Signal recognizes:

1. Top Funnel: This is the start of your funnel —the awareness stage. This stage is all about reaching your audience and gaining awareness and attention from individuals that are not yet familiar with your product or service. The typical top of funnel metrics are impressions, impression lost, impression share and opportunity because these are all focused on getting ads in front of the max number of potential customers.
2. Middle Funnel: This part is typically referred to as the “interest and consideration” phase. Audiences are aware of your products, even interested in them, and closer to making a purchase. At this stage, they want more information to help them with their consideration. Search ads and social ads are known for capitalizing on middle funnel buyers. Key metrics at this stage are clicks, CTR, cost, wasted spend, average cost per click and more.
3. Bottom Funnel: The Bottom funnel is the crucial turning point where audiences are ready to take action. This is when you turn audiences into customers. Important metrics here are conversion rate, return on ad spend, cost per conversion and more.

This is how the typical funnel works. Again, the “Metrics” settings tab allows you to rearrange these items and align the PPC Signal’s analysis with your own marketing funnel design.

Investigating Signals In PPC Signal

In the PPC Signal demo, there are 78 total observations that the tool has returned for the sample data. Signals can be further broken down into simple or complex signals and positive or negative signals.

Note: Don’t have 78 total observations in your demo? Try removing the default applied filter of only displaying the best quality signals!

Simple Signals

With a simple signal, you’re looking at one metric under the lens of a single dimension. Typically, this means comparing the current status of a metric with a previous time period of the same metric. In this example, time is the dimension. You can also look at which device types are performing best, which location provides the best returns, etc.

Complex Signals

Complex signals are, well, complex. This means that they consist of many different dimensions. You may look at which time of the day a certain device type performs best in a given location for a specific metric. Complex signals create complex opportunities that will have a definite effect on your campaign performance, but they can be a nightmare to unpack through traditional means.

For instance, imagine that you have a campaign with 10 ad groups. Each ad group has 10 keywords. You’re targeting 4 device types, 7 days of the week, with 24 hours out of the day. With all of these dimensions, the number of unique combinations is staggering. It’s too much to handle with manual reporting. We’re talking about several thousand rows of data.

PPC Signal makes it more comfortable and efficient to detect and unpack complex signals.

Positive Signals (Opportunities)

Another way to classify signals is by good and bad, or positive and negative. Good aligned signals are the aforementioned opportunities that can have a progressive, positive effect. In PPC Signal, positive observations are highlighted by green text in the description.

You can also see how PPC Signal labels the signal type in the info pane.

An example of an opportunity could be a device type that is suddenly experiencing a lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA) value than normal. History has taught you that this device type is positive and profitable for your campaign and your business. Thus, increasing spend will help you take advantage of lower costs and maximize your ROI.

You can also look at opportunity signals as growth that has yet to be captured. Let’s say your campaign has 100 total eligible impressions, but only actually received 20 of those impressions. This means that there is a significant opportunity for growth left.

Negative Signals (Risks)

On the other side of the spectrum are negative signals. These are the bad parts of your PPC accounts that represent potential risks. These are signals that are hurting your progress and need to be resolved to limit any further damage. Negative signals are highlighted by red text in the description.

PPC Signal labels negative signals as “Risk” under the signal type.

Building off the same example as before, let’s say that instead of your CPA lowering, it spikes upwards. This means that you’re paying more than usual on this particular device type. In turn, this lowers your ROI. It may even be producing a negative ROI or draining your budget at a rapid pace. You need to stop this from continuing to harm your performance by pausing that campaign temporarily or adjusting it to negate this risk.

Accessing Signals

Now that you’ve learned at length about the different types of signals and how they can impact your campaign performance, it’s time to explore where and how you can view these observations or signals in the tool’s interface.

From the main PPC Signal screen, you can find all of your signals. Each tab at the top allows you to choose which level you’d like to view these observations from Campaign, Ad Group, Keyword, Device, Geo or Hour of Day.

Once you’ve selected the desired level to view signals, you’ll see a list of all observations at this level. Then, you can click on one to learn more.

For every observation, you can choose to “Explore” or “Bookmark” the signal.

Exploring Signals

The “Explore” option expands the signal visualization.

This will allow you to get a more detailed, closer look at what’s going on and how this signal is affecting your PPC performance.

This is an excellent feature because data across a very brief period can be misleading. You need to look at the data over a longer period of time to really get a complete understanding of the performance or process, especially when seeing how various parts of your PPC accounts attribute to completing key marketing goals and objectives.

In the sample, there is an apparent spike or fluctuation that seems to break the “normal” pattern of things. Spikes are always noteworthy and raise a lot of questions. By proactively answering these questions through notes, you have a more detailed understanding of cause and effect throughout time.

In the “Explore” interface, you can also directly change the metrics being seen, as shown in the following image.

As you add more data to the chart, the more complicated it becomes, which makes it harder to infer those valuable insights. PPC Signal gives you the option to switch from the visualization chart to a tabular view.

You can then export the table as an “Excel” or “CSV” file.

Once you choose a file format, the data table will be downloaded and can be used in other environments and programs that support these files.

Bookmarking Signals

While this feature is blocked in the demo version, the live version of PPC Signal allows marketers to bookmark signals to revisit later. Otherwise, it could be challenging to find the exact observation again. Bookmarked observations appear in their own category so you can get right back to analyzing the findings.

Bookmarking a signal is simple; just press the button shown below.

Once you successfully bookmark the signal , later you will be able to find your bookmarked signal on top of the screen. Just click on “Bookmarked” then you will be able to see all those signals which you marked them.

Taking Action On Signals

When you find a signal that requires action, such as a campaign component that is vastly underperforming, then you need to know how to use PPC Signal to remedy this problem. This is one of the primary purposes of using this PPC management tool: to take action on potential risks that threaten to disrupt your campaign success or seize a valuable opportunity!

From the “Explore” screen, you can click the “Take Action” button to see what options you have regarding the observation.

Once you click the action button, you’ll see some options on how you can proceed with handling the given signal.

Each option pertains to a different level or campaign feature. And, within each option, there are several avenues you can take. For instance, if you selected the “Campaign action,” you’ll be able to change the status from “Active” to “Paused” or even “Remove.”

There are instances where a campaign is suffering so much that the best action may be to pause it until you can get to the source of the problem.

Registering For PPC Signal Beta

Happy with the PPC Signal demo and ready for the beta version? The demo version has some limitations that are lifted in this fuller version. To register for the PPC Signal beta and access the tool, refer to the left-most menu bar and click “Register for beta” under Accounts.

This will create a dropdown menu asking you to enter the Google account associated with your Google Ads campaign.

Once you’ve entered your Google email, press the “Register” button.

After you click “Register,” you’ll receive an email to your Gmail account that will have a 4-digit verification code. Enter this code into the box on the screen and then click confirm.

Once your email is validated, you’ll be able to enjoy the full functionality of PPC Signal.

Pricing Plans For PPC Signal

In this section, we’ll take a look at the pricing plans available to PPC Signal users.

The first thing to note is that PPC Signal’s pricing structure is based on the size of the user’s PPC account and monthly ad spend. For example, if you have a single PPC account spending $5,000 a month (or less) on Google Ads, then PPC Signal costs a total price of $10.

Here is a complete breakdown of the pricing structure of PPC Signal. You can use this table to help decide for yourself how much the tool will cost for your business. There are also custom plans available by contacting the PPC Signal team directly.

Wrap Up

There are not many tools on the market that present the complex changes occurring in a PPC account in such a simple manner. That’s exactly what you get from PPC Signal. It is a simple, powerful solution that turns complexity into an advantage! Your competitors won’t have nearly the same level of efficiency when it comes to identifying noteworthy changes and taking an appropriate course of action.

The real power of PPC Signal is when you can stack these small changes on a consistent basis. When you can continuously make course corrections to your campaigns (avoiding risks, steering towards opportunities), growth begins to build exponentially. All it takes are just a few daily changes!