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You can’t go long in the digital marketing world without hearing about the significance of data.
You could even argue that modern marketing is less about managing campaigns and more about managing your data.
Marketing metrics and data are readily available. Services like Google Ads provide dashboards full of convenient metrics and other data that you can use to improve your strategies.
The problem is that this raw data isn’t as valuable as you might believe. Without the ability to transform data into actionable insights, these metrics and dashboards offer limited value.
However, these actionable insights are rarely easy to obtain. Marketing data is dynamic and complex, which makes it challenging to track and analyze.
This discussion will look at what are actionable insights versus metrics. You’ll learn the steps, tools and other methods that help convert raw data into actionable ways to improve your strategies.
Let’s dive in.
PPC metrics help you gauge the performance of your campaigns. If your strategies are not performing well or as expected, metrics are like your first line of defense. They tell you what’s going wrong.
Are clicks lower than normal?
Is your conversion rate suffering?
Are costs too high?
Unfortunately, knowing what’s wrong is only half the battle. If your kitchen sink is leaking, you know the problem, but you need to understand why it’s leaking before you can fix it.
Insights help you answer this why. Then, you can take steps to resolve low-performing strategies. Insights can also help you capitalize when performance is peaking.
It’s about driving a deeper understanding of why changes to your performance happen in PPC. If the information doesn’t add value or incite a specific reaction, it’s probably not an insight.
There are several ways that PPC insights benefit your campaigns.
With your leaking kitchen sink, you may make several guesses about the problem. You tighten the fittings, look for any corrosion, replace a washer or two and so on, until you hopefully fix the issue.
This trial and error process can take time and you may never reach the correct conclusion.
In marketing, time is a precious commodity. You don’t want to spend it troubleshooting problems with your campaigns. You also don’t want to make incorrect decisions about how to improve your campaigns.
When you reach an incorrect conclusion about your data, it can lead to unintended negative results. You may assume the problem is fixed without realizing that there are underlying causes that have been left unresolved.
Insights provide much-needed clarity into problems. There’s no guesswork because you have data-backed insight into the best solution.
Thus, you consistently make better optimization decisions regarding your campaigns.
The root of successful marketing is understanding your customers. The more you know about them and what they want, the easier it is to deliver.
Your PPC metrics represent audience actions, like clicks and conversions. When you understand why these actions take place, you start to see the types of offers, messages and other tactics that customers want.
Customer insights are arguably the most potent because they help you across your marketing strategy, not just in PPC.
These insights also help you deliver more personalized customer experiences. You can cater ad experiences to each individual’s specific wants and needs.
These highly targeted experiences lead to higher performance and conversions because they are highly relevant and valuable to the prospective customer.
More conversions lead to an increase in revenue. You can better influence when customers convert and the value of their conversions.
Plus, personalized experiences encourage customers to return for future purchases. This increases the lifetime value of each customer your business attracts.
Moreover, marketing insights can help you detect the most valuable and profitable campaigns, ad groups and keywords in your account.
With this information, you can better allocate your time and resources to the parts of your strategy that produce the best results.
As you increase your revenue with marketing insights, you also take steps towards maximizing your ROI. More revenue equals more returns.
By optimizing where you spend your time, money and other resources, you simultaneously reduce waste. It’s the act of decreasing spending where it isn’t properly utilized and funneling it into more profitable areas.
That’s ROI optimization 101 – cutting costs and improving results at the same time.
Some PPC marketers are misled to believe that the only way to beat competitors on Google Ads is to outbid them.
Not only is this not true, but it is also a poor way to compete. Funneling more money into your campaigns can hurt your ROI if you aren’t using that increased budget wisely.
The better approach is to outsmart the competition using marketing insights. Analyzing your metrics can often reveal potential competitor strategies.
For instance, if a keyword sees higher click costs or fewer impressions, it could be a sign that a competitor has moved in on that particular search term. With this insight, you can develop ways to counter-strategize.
To get started, let’s look at examples of common PPC metrics and why they aren’t insights. It’s crucial to successful marketing practice to understand the difference between the two and how to use the word “insight” correctly.
This section will look at how you can use each metric to obtain insights.
The process is not always direct. By looking at these examples of metrics turned into actionable insights, you’ll start to learn ways to apply the information to your own strategies.
Impressions are the most basic metric in PPC marketing. It is a measure of how many times your ad was displayed on a search results page.
If you look at your Google Ads dashboard and see that you have 1,000 impressions, it means that your ad was triggered in 1,000 Google searches and shown to the users.
Impressions should be the highest metric for your campaigns. After all, you can’t have more clicks than impressions!
The short answer is no; impressions alone don’t tell you much. You see how many views your ads received, but there’s no context. You need more information!
Imagine if you were a candidate in an election. Your campaign advisor tells you that you received 100 votes. Receiving votes, like impressions, is always good, but how do you know if this is a high or low number?
Is it more than previous periods? Is it more than the competition? Are you in the lead?
Now, the question is: “How do you transform raw impressions into insights?” In other words, how do you create context for your impression data to be useful?
There are a few approaches you can take.
A low impression share could be a sign that you are missing out on ad ranks. You can dig further to see why this is. There are other metrics as well when compared all together with impression they provide better insights.
Not only will this comparison of past to present help you measure your current success, you can also use it to forecast what is still to come in the future!
Detecting these changes to your impressions will help you catch risks or opportunities that could negatively or positively impact your campaigns.
There are several reasons why impression performance may change from one period to the next. Your keywords may be experiencing fewer searches. Or, your competitors may be taking away your impressions.
These dimensions help you view your data across different categories, while also enabling you to compare each. By seeing how your impressions are distributed across these various categories, you can detect your best and worst performers.
For example, if you’re targeting multiple locations with ads, you can see how each area affects your impressions. Where do you see the most and least number of impressions?
Consider the following chart created by ChartExpo. It depicts impressions by device type.
Immediately, you can see that overall impressions are down compared to the previous period. Smart TV even didn’t get any impressions neither before nor now.
Mobile impressions are particularly suffering. In the previous period, it was the best generator of ad views. Now, it’s barely able to produce any. That’s an actionable insight that shows a massive problem within your campaign that needs to be resolved.
AI algorithms can automate the detection of interesting, noteworthy changes that need more exploring. These types of occurrences in your campaigns are where many insights begin.
PPC Signal is one example of an AI tool that detects potential insights in your campaign data automatically.
Here’s an example of an impression-based signal.
You can see how impressions are moving, by how much, when and in which parts of your account.
PPC Signal presents these types of data trends, shifts and other events across your entire account.
Suddenly, actionable insights are not so arduous!
Let’s look at another PPC metric: clicks. PPC is built around clicks. Your costs are directly tied to this metric. That’s why it’s called pay-per-click.
Each click that your campaigns generate represents a search user landing on your website. More clicks mean more traffic to your pages. Plus, it’s a fantastic justification of effective targeting and ad copy because it suggests people are interested enough in your messages to click.
Similar to impressions, clicks alone don’t give much insight. At best, it shows you how many people came from the SERPs to your website.
More clicks mean more site visitors. So, the more clicks you have, the more potential value your campaigns are creating.
However, you need more information and context to know when and if your click values are high or low.
Given the significance of clicks, particularly concerning your costs, you must examine this metric from all angles. This will maximize the number of actionable insights you obtain.
Here are some strategies to get you started:
CTR: Clickthrough is another metric that looks at the ratio between clicks and impressions. It adds a little more value to your click data by helping you understand how often this event occurs based on your total impressions.
That said, because CTR is just another metric, it only adds a minimal amount of insight into your clicks. You don’t know if your CTR is high, low or average without performing additional analysis.
You may have to look at the CTR of several campaigns, ad groups or even individual keywords to determine what’s an acceptable ratio.
Time: The fastest way to add context to your click data is to compare past to present performance. There are two approaches to this method. You can compare the last period to the current one, such as last month to now.
Alternatively, you can compare the same period from last year to the current year. Often, marketing trends can be seasonal, especially in advertising.
For example, if you’re comparing November’s metrics to December, the results will be skewed because of the busy holiday shopping at the end of the year. In this case, it may be best to compare last December to this year.
This will allow you to determine how well you’re performing compared to years past.
By Cost: Since clicks directly impact your costs, you must look at the impact of these actions on your budget. You don’t want to accidentally overpay for clicks because it will hurt your returns and traffic.
For instance, if you have $100 in your budget and clicks cost you $1, you can afford 100 new visitors to your site. But, if those costs rise to say $5, then you can suddenly only afford 20.
Thus, locating areas of high and low click costs can be an effective strategy. You’ll have a clearer view of your budget and ROI.
By Value: Understanding your costs is a great start, but it has limitations. After all, cost-per-click is another metric. The context that it fails to provide is the value of those clicks.
There are cases where paying more for a click is acceptable because the value of that traffic is higher. For instance, if a high-cost keyword has an exceptionally high conversion rate, it may justify the expense.
The returns from these conversions outweigh the elevated costs of the click.
You need to look at conversions, conversion value and other data to evaluate the value of each click and then compare it to the costs.
By Dimensions: One of the best ways to track costs and click performance is by incorporating various dimensions, like days of the week or user location. This enables you to see how the data is distributed.
Adding dimensions to the data helps you see the picture more clearly. You’ll know the performance of each keyword at every day of the week, hour of the day, across each device type and in each location you’re targeting.
The added visibility helps you understand when, where and how clicks occur. You also learn about your audience search habits, which can serve you in other areas of your marketing strategy.
Charting: Again, charting your metrics and data is always a wise move. As you add more dimensions and metrics into the mix, it becomes harder to ascertain the meaning behind the numbers. In short, more data becomes more overwhelming.
When you chart the data, this confusion clears up right away. You can instantly see how the data is distributed and compare different metrics or categories to one another.
Here are two examples:
In the first chart, you can see the performance of each day of the week in terms of clicks. This helps you determine the best times to advertise and when your audience is most receptive to offers.
The second chart displays the total cost of clicks and breaks that sum down by price range. It showcases not only what you’re spending but how the money is spent.
For instance, in the previous period, marked by gray bars, many clicks cost more than $5. In the current time, that number has been minimized, which positively affects overall costs.
This type of insight can help you determine when your campaigns are headed in the right (or wrong) direction.
AI Algorithm: Let’s take a look at another AI-driven signal provided by PPC Signal. Remember, machine learning algorithms can make quick work of complex data and present exciting findings that you otherwise may have missed in your manual analysis.
Anomalies are odd and unexpected occurrences in your data. If you’re only looking at the raw metrics, it can be hard to notice these oddities. Even if you detect an outlier, knowing the cause or its impact on other metrics can be challenging.
In the PPC Signal example, the anomaly is that impressions are increasing, while clicks are decreasing.
In theory, the impression-click relationship says that more impressions lead to more clicks because more people see your message. In this particular campaign and location, the opposite is occurring. Despite more impressions, you’re generating fewer clicks.
AI provides the context you need to make sense of your data.
Finding marketing insights is challenging without a smart tool. In the previous section, you saw screenshots from PPC Signal, a powerful campaign management solution that empowers your data analysis with AI.
This section will further explore smart tool, including how it works and why it is the most effective PPC tool for obtaining actionable insights.
The PPC Signal dashboard is designed with simplicity in mind. It makes finding actionable insights as easy as opening up the tool and choosing which signal to investigate first.
When you first access your PPC Signal dashboard, you see the above screen. Of course, the insights are catered to your own Google Ads account.
These active signals represent current, noteworthy performance chances across your account. Each signal includes all of the information you need to understand the change. Plus, you can explore each one further to get even more insight into the data and metrics involved.
This shows you a detailed view of the signal data. Here is an example:
From this screen, you can add other metrics to the data to see how the signal impacts your other metrics. This is extremely helpful when you need more context about your performance.
In the following screenshot, conversion data is added to the chart. This reveals another piece of the puzzle. As your cost per conversion is skyrocketing, conversions are going down, which gives you more intel on what’s happening behind your metrics.
You can view the same data as a table.
The PPC Signal system makes it easier to extract insights – the AI does it for you automatically – and engage with your data.
You’ll always know what’s happening and why.
There is no mistaking that PPC Signal is a gem among other PPC tools.
Through the power of AI automation, you can spend less time and effort on campaign management, while extracting more actionable insights at the same time.
As shown above, the system is straightforward and easy to use. Arduous insights become a breeze!
While this is the primary benefit of using PPC Signal, there are plenty of other reasons to be excited about this tool.
If you’re operating a particularly large PPC account, you could have many active signals on your dashboard at once. Of course, not all of these signals are equally important.
You don’t want to have to cycle through less-important performance changes to get to the ones with the most impact and relevance to your PPC goals.
PPC Signal’s dashboard has several filtering options that you can apply to your active signal list. You can use these settings to remove less relevant signals and focus only on the ones that matter.
Here are all of the ways you can filter your active signals:
These options let you approach your insights the way you want. The “Metrics” filter is one of the best to use because you can focus on the data that directly aligns with your goals.
If you’re worried about ROI and costs, you can filter by CPC, wasted spend and other metrics.
Alternatively, you could use the campaign filter to see active insights for each. This allows you to optimize your most essential campaigns first.
The device type, geography and HoD filters help you analyze your metrics by dimension.
It’s all up to you how you filter and interact with your signals!
As discussed, metrics alone are not very valuable because they lack context.
In PPC, context helps you understand when performance is up, down, average, better than the competition, worse, etc.
Every signal in the dashboard has plenty of context. Let’s take a look at a sample signal and see what context is provided.
PPC Signal is not the only AI-enabled management solution. Yet, it is a step ahead of competing solutions because of how much context it provides for your account changes.
Other PPC tools only give you part of the puzzle. It may tell you what’s changing and when it started, but fails to include the additional details that PPC Signal offers.
More context means more actionable insights. That’s the advantage of using PPC Signal.
Without PPC Signal, the PPC management process is tedious, stressful and overwhelming. No matter the size of your account, you have to constantly stay on top of many daily changes to your campaigns.
This can be a stressful and tiring endeavor. Tracking these changes alone can sink hours out of your day if you aren’t using an AI solution.
That’s not including the countless more time that you need to analyze the changes and gain insight.
There are two incredible benefits to using PPC Signal to automate the majority of this process.
The first benefit is efficiency. By saving many hours monitoring and analyzing the data by hand, you can get more done each day.
All of these hours can be funneled to more impactful tasks, like following up with insights and making positive performance changes to your account.
The second benefit is less stress for you as an account manager. As soon as you begin using PPC Signal, you start to feel the pressure and headaches melting away.
The PPC management process suddenly becomes easy and straightforward, rather than complex and tedious.
You may even have some fun resolving your active signals and watching your campaign growth accelerate!
Knowing what are actionable insights and what are PPC metrics helps you make sense of what’s actually going on in your Google Ads account.
Most importantly, you’ll know why changes and data events occur.
Metrics have always been readily accessible to PPC marketers. All you need to do is open your Google Ads account and you can see your latest metrics.
Unfortunately, more is needed to make smart, data-driven decisions about your ad strategies. You need insights.
Traditionally, it was an arduous process to transform raw metrics into actionable insights.
Thanks to PPC Signal, that’s no longer the case. With this AI-powered solution, insights are accessible to marketers at all times.
It will automatically detect and analyze changes and present them to you with all of the context you need to make smart decisions.
There is nothing stopping you anymore from obtaining actionable insights.
What are you waiting for?
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