Simple Sankey Diagram: The Money-Saving Tool for PPC Managers to Visualize their Clients’ Campaigns

Have you been experiencing difficulties with hitting your clients’ target ROIs?

Often, the aforementioned missed targets are the result of drop-offs throughout your conversion funnels.

However, most PPC managers are still unaware of how they can optimize their sales funnels to connect with leads, identify top prospects, and generate engagement and sales.

Comprehensive funnel analysis allows you to streamline your clients’ pay-per-click (PPC) ads by identifying drop-offs.

The gained insights can be leveraged to guide conversion rate optimization activities.

An effective data visualization tool can provide you with actionable insights across each stage of your funnel for you to chart your customers’ journey across key touchpoints easily.

Remember, your pay-per-click (PPC) strategy is only as strong as your clients’ sales funnels.

By conducting a thorough funnel analysis, you can gain insights into the changes needed to increase your overall conversion rates.

This blog will uncover a top-secret data visualization strategy that will help you unlock the true potential of your client’s PPC campaigns.

Data Visualization and PPC Management

The human brain is hardwired for images and other forms of visual content.

As a PPC manager, you need a data visualization strategy that provides you with insights into your ad campaigns. Visual content straightforwardly tells the whole story.

Storytelling is a fantastic way of establishing an emotional connection with your readers.

A picture is worth a 1,000-words

Stick with me to discover a money-saving data visualization tool that will help you identify the leakages preventing you from unlocking your full PPC potential.

What’s a Sankey Diagram?

Well, the Sankey chart is a PPC data visualization tool on steroids.

It provides an overview of the flows in a system, such as a customer journey in search engine marketing (SEM).

Each flow has a varying height depending on its quantity to help determine the most prominent contributions quickly. This data visualization chart makes it easy to draw actionable insights for optimizing your clients’ Google Ad campaigns.

A Sankey diagram shares great similarities with an alluvial chart, albeit the latter typically visualizes change over time.

Pay-per-click (PPC) ad agencies can perform a much easier analysis to form a stronger basis for smarter decisions using a Sankey flow diagram.

What are the Golden Benefits of Using Sankey Visualization Chart?

Identify Money-Draining Leakages Preventing You from Achieving Target ROIs

Sankey charts visually display how clients’ prospects are moving through sales funnels and how their choices and steps coordinate with the ideal way you want the funnels to function.

Identifying drop-off zones along the sales funnel is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

A recent research found that improving the efficiency of the sales funnel is a top priority for 18% of companies, outnumbered only by closing more deals, with 28% of companies stating this as a preference.

Do you want to hear the good news?

Identifying drop-offs with a Sankey diagram and a thorough conversion funnel optimization can help deliver incredible returns for your customers.

Of course, there’ll be a percentage of your clients’ leads that fail to make it into the sales funnel at all or drop off at early stages.

Although a perfect conversion rate probably isn’t in reach, there’re actionable steps that can be taken to optimize your conversion rate by decreasing the number of prospect drop-offs.

Investigating the “where” and the “why” of prospect drop-offs will help you understand how to cultivate more engaging calls to action (CTA) during each phase of your clients’ sales funnels.

A Sankey chart’s ability to visualize user flows from one dimension to the next is very powerful.

100% Seamless Integration with Google Ads Accounts / Google Manager

Google Analytics users are already familiar with the concept of a Sankey diagram. Using this incredibly powerful data visualization tool in pay-per-click (PPC) marketing simply wasn’t possible in the past.

Why?

Sankey charts for digital marketing did not exist.

The concept is borrowed from natural sciences and engineering. It was not easy for PPC ad agencies to leverage the data visualization chart without hiring a data scientist.

ChartExpo is the only company with custom Sankey charts; to help PPC managers visualize the customer journey in their sales funnels easily.

You Don’t Need Gigantic Amounts of Data to Enjoy the ‘Sankey-Effect.’

Essentially, you only need one metric and two dimensions to gain actionable insights to optimize your PPC ads.

In the next few seconds, you’ll witness firsthand why Sankey charts are indeed a game-changer.

How do you Create Sankey Charts with Excel?

Excel is one of the most heavily-used tools for analytics by small and medium-sized PPC businesses.

Diagramming Sankey charts is nearly impossible because Excel lacks intuitive flowcharts or tree diagram templates.

However, with a highly affordable and easy-to-use ChartExpo add-in , the process becomes a lot easier and more streamlined than what you could ever think of.

To be honest, creating a Sankey diagram using ChartExpo on Excel takes seconds because the tool is cloud-hosted.

Follow the steps mentioned below to create Sankey diagrams on Excel.

To Get Started with ChartExpo for Excel Add-In, follow the Simple and Easy Steps Below.

• Open your Excel desktop application.
• Open the worksheet and click on the ‘INSERT’ menu
• You’ll see the ‘My Apps’ option.
• Click on ‘My Apps’ and then click on ‘See All’.

• You will see the screen as shown in the screenshot below.
• You’ll see your add-in ‘ChartExpo for Excel.’
• If you don’t, please click on the ‘Refresh’ button.
• Select this add-in and click on the ‘Insert’ button.

• The add-in will be added to the Excel application, as shown on the screenshot below.
• Log in with your Microsoft account or create a new account by clicking the ‘Create New’ link button.
• Login with the newly created account and start using the add-in.
• Enter your newly created account and start using the ChartExpo add-in . You’re only required to log in for the first time. Next time, ChartExpo won’t ask for your details again.
• Now you can start using ChartExpo™ for Excel to access incredible Sankey visualization of your data

• Now click on the Create Chart to get started.

• You’ll see an extensive library of visual charts categorized into six different groups.
• More so, you can expand any group by clicking on it to see a list of available visualizations.

• You can select the Sankey chart under the category of Sankey

Let’s Analyze a Sample Google Ads Campaign Data

The data on Excel, as shown on the screenshot above, is complicated without a creative visualization chart.

Remember, on your ChartExpo, you’ll come across the metric and dimensions buttons.  When ‘Please select a column for Sankey metric’ message pops, fill in the metric you want to investigate.

When ChartExpo dashboard tells you ‘Please select columns for Sankey levels’ fill in the campaign dimensions.

• You can also edit the chart to make it more visually appealing.

For example, you can customize the colors and rename the chart with only a click (highlighted by the red boxes on the screenshot below).

• To add the header of the Chart simple click on the header and rename and press the ‘apply’

After some customizations, your chart should look like this:

What are the Results?

Going from left to right, the data is laid out in sequence. It’s easy to analyze the user behavior on social networks to gain insights into drop-off rates.

LinkedIn is the poorest contributor of traffic visits on the landing page. This is a potential red flag if you have PPC ads running on the platform.

It seems that the blog is the biggest recipient of traffic (37%), followed by landing page 2.

Easy peasy work!

The campaign has a substantial leakage (drop-off zone) that’s likely to inhibit ROI growth. Pages 1 and 3 need to be optimized to attract more traffic from the social media platforms.

Pinterest and Instagram are the significant contributors of traffic to the campaign followed Facebook, Twitter, and Quora.

The Sankey chart above provides you with actionable insights into the landing pages getting more visits from social media channels.

Sankey chart is bidirectional, which means you can “read” the chart from left to right, or right to left.

The Sankey diagram is a great tool for visualizing the customer journey in PPC advertising, but it is essential to limit your analysis to a single session.

Why?

If you overload the chart with too much data, it can quickly become unreadable. Customer journey is the next big thing.

If you can measure it, you can optimize it much better.

Using the Sankey diagram can help enterprise-level PPC companies to approach their clients’ leads on different channels with personalized brand messaging for a unified user experience.

What to Consider before Deploying a Sankey Diagram

To be absolutely sure that a Sankey diagram is the best option for your PPC campaign data, there’re a few questions that you should ask:

1. Are there any other options in the ChartExpo library of charts that better depict your campaign data?
2. Do you want your clients’ leads to perform a certain action, or are you just trying to tell the story behind your data?
3. Do your clients have enough experience with PPC charts to make sense of a Sankey chart?
4. What insights is Sankey chart communicating to your clients?

Is this what you intended?

Why ChartExpo for Excel Add-in?

• It’s affordable and incredibly easy to use. You don’t need data science or IT skills to operate it.
• It has an export option to facilitate the seamless transfer of your Sankey diagram in PNG, JPEG, and other formats.
• It comes armed with an easy-to-use and friendly user interface (UI). You don’t need to be a data scientist to visualize your campaign data using ChartExpo.
• Requires No Coding at all. A huge chunk of visualization tools in the market require some form of programming skills.

Who has time to code and optimize ad campaigns profitably at the same time?

Besides, coding implies switching back-and-forth between a chart and a text editor interface.

Essentially, you need a tool with a friendly user interface (UI) to enhance your personalized experience (UX).

Wrap Up

It’s crystal clear that the Sankey charts are incredibly powerful in uncovering your Google Ad campaigns’ leakages in your clients’ sales funnel.

Some of the moneymaking benefits of Sankey Charts to PPC ad agencies include the following:

1. The methodology can help you to uncover the leakages preventing your PPC ad agency from achieving target ROIs
2. Sankey diagram integrates seamlessly with Google Ads accounts to provide you with actionable insights to profitably optimize ad campaigns.
3. You don’t need cumbersome amounts of campaign data to identify money-draining problems on your clients’ paid search campaigns using Sankey diagrams.

You cannot use Excel as a stand-alone app to visualize your PPC campaigns without a third-party add-in.

This is where the affordable and easy-to-use ChartExpo comes to your rescue.

ChartExpo is custom-made purposely for PPC marketers because it’s loaded with innumerable tailor-made visual charts related to paid search marketing.

ChartExpo should be your data visualization partner in 2021.

Why?

• It’s affordable and incredibly easy-to-use. You don’t need data science or IT skills to operate it.
• It has an export option to facilitate seamless and EASY transfer of your Sankey chart as PNG, JPEG, and other formats.
• It comes armed with intuitive data visualization charts that tell you everything with just a glance.

Make your customers happy by increasing their ROI within the next 30 days……or your money back.

Conduct a ‘health check-up’ on your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns FREE of charge.