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“The path to success is to take massive, determined actions.” – Tony Robbins (Tony is a life and business strategist).
This quote by Tony Robbins is exceptional advice in any facet of life, but it also speaks volumes about the importance of actionable intelligence in marketing.
By Robbins’ words, marketing success is attainable by taking determined actions. But, how do we determine what these actions are?
Businesses and marketing teams are often slow to act because it’s difficult to definitively know what the next step should be. They may have lots of guesses at how to proceed, but their trepidation keeps them from acting.
The way to determine the best actions is through your data.
This discussion will answer what is actionable intelligence and how to acquire it by analyzing your raw PPC data.
Let’s begin.
Actionable intelligence, also popularly referred to as actionable insight, is information acquired through data analysis that leads to meaningful action.
The distinction of “actionable” information is crucial. It takes extra work for your data to become actionable.
For instance, if you see that you have 100 clicks for a campaign, so what? That information isn’t actionable. You have to analyze those clicks and the non-clicks to determine what’s working and what isn’t.
Through actionable intelligence, you discover activities that improve your campaign performance directly.
You’ll become aware of new developments or trends earlier, giving you the opportunity to beat competitors to the punch. Any potential risks or unexpected changes will also be detected and corrected swiftly.
Acquiring actionable intelligence isn’t easy. It requires you to constantly monitor, track and analyze your data. This can quickly become tedious, especially if you don’t have the right marketing tools.
That said, the work is definitely worth the reward! There are many advantages of actionable intelligence in PPC marketing.
Marketing needs to be customer-focused.
When you host a dinner party for friends and family, you ask about food allergies and preferences because you want to deliver the best dining experience to your guests.
The same is true of marketing. You want to devise the best possible marketing experiences that align with the preferences of your audience.
The problem is that you can’t call up every customer and ask what they want. This is where you need actionable intelligence.
By analyzing data from customer interactions, you can discover vital intel on how to approach them with marketing messages.
Actionable intelligence also helps you to determine how to segment your audience into more logical groups based on demographics, psychographics, behaviors and more.
Actionable intelligence becomes a guiding light for your marketing team. If you have the ability and tools to acquire insights steadily, you always have a next-step action to improve.
In PPC marketing, continuous optimization is vital because so many factors can influence your campaign performance.
Thus, your key metrics are constantly fluctuating. You need to identify these fluctuations and adjust accordingly.
It will be much harder to know how, when and why to adjust your PPC campaigns without this actionable intelligence.
You’ll be slower to react to positive or negative changes, impeding your overall growth and giving competitors an easy advantage.
In short, you don’t want to assume how to improve your campaigns each day; you need to thanks to the actionable intelligence you’ve gathered.
A significant component to optimizing an advertising campaign is improving your spending and how you actually spend that money.
Every click costs you money with the PPC model. But, not all of these clicks have the same value.
Optimizing your budget means allocating your money towards the keyword targets with the most value, thereby maximizing your potential returns.
Actionable intelligence enables you to stop wasting time and money on underperforming strategies.
Plus, increasing the overall performance of your PPC campaigns will improve your Quality Scores, a measure that Google uses to assess your click costs and ad ranks.
The better your ads, the less you’ll have to pay for clicks at the top paid ad rank.
Essentially, actionable intelligence allows you to do more with the time and marketing budget you have.
Improving performance and lowering your costs? That’s a recipe for increasing your ROI.
ROI is a popular measure to gauge the overall success of your campaigns. The higher your PPC ROI, the greater your profits.
This makes it an ideal metric to use when justifying your performance to clients, managers and stakeholders.
The benefits of actionable intelligence are enough to make any marketer or business owner start to drool.
So, how do we get there? How do we turn raw data into actionable intelligence?
Essentially, actionable intelligence is data-born information that details how to improve your strategies. So, the first thing you need to achieve actionable intelligence is data.
“Great! I have lots of data. I have data coming out of my eyes and ears!” you might be saying to yourself.
Not so fast.
“Data” is a very broad term that encompasses almost anything that pertains to your business. However, you need to be extremely specific with the data you collect and prepare for your analysis.
One of the most time-consuming, tedious parts of the analysis process is separating the data you need from what you don’t.
It’s particularly challenging for digital marketing because your overall strategy stretches across so many channels. You may have to gather data from several sources and then find a way to merge those different sets.
The data you gather will largely depend on the analysis questions you ask. This is a specific question that you hope to answer through your analysis of the data.
An example might be, “Why is my site’s ad traffic down this week?” You would then consider what data you need to answer this question, such as clicks and CTR figures from this week and past ones.
Posing a proper analysis question may seem easy, but it takes an exceptionally high understanding of how data works and what problems it can solve.
This is why many companies are increasingly looking for marketers with backgrounds in data science.
When a marketer has a high acuity in data science, they are more skilled at asking the right questions and selecting the correct data to answer that query.
By nature, our brains are not programmed for raw numerical data. No matter how fast you can solve for x, your brain will always prefer visuals over numbers.
After all, your brain has been absorbing, processing and analyzing visual data since you first opened your eyes as a newborn.
In your journey to transforming your raw data into actionable intelligence, you must chart the data and visualize it.
When you visually depict your data, you not only analyze the information quicker, but you also realize greater and more profound insights than if you only saw the data as a spreadsheet.
Through data visualization, actionable insights will rise right to the surface. You’ll physically be able to see them in your charts.
Actionable intelligence is not evergreen. You don’t acquire it once and have it for life.
Considering the speed and frequency that PPC marketing data changes, the shelf-life of any actionable intelligence you acquire is less than a carton of milk.
This means that you have to put processes in place to consistently discover actionable insights relevant to the current marketing landscape.
When you acquire new intelligence, there are three steps to take:
With only 4 stages, the process to turn data into actionable intelligence is deceptively simple on paper. In reality, it’s a painstaking process without the help of automation.
The process is shaped like a funnel. You spend most of your time in the early stages, while the final stage requires the least amount of time and effort. This is why many Google Ads tools focus on helping you collect, analyze and chart your data.
When a marketing analysis tool can automate those time-intensive stages in the beginning, you can focus most of your time and attention on discovering insights, making adjustments and evaluating changes.
Otherwise, you’ll waste time and resources sifting through data and performing tedious analyses, just to answer a single question.
Marketing data presents multiple challenges to marketers, many we’ve already touched on.
You have mountains of data, with more being created all the time. The most substantial challenge is separating valuable data from the non-so-valuable.
Even a small Google Ads account will target hundreds of keywords, each that may need attention. A more substantial account could easily have tens of thousands of targets.
It gets a lot more sizable and complex when you start looking at those keywords across device types, locations, time and other dimensions.
Your marketing campaigns are constantly creating data. There are always new and emerging shifts, trends and other fluctuations occurring.
These changes are reflections of the current marketing landscape, including which keywords are thriving, how your audience is searching, what offers are most valuable and so much more.
Knowing this actionable intelligence is vital to stay on top. It helps you measure your marketing campaign effectiveness and make strategic improvements.
The challenge is being able to maintain pace with your ever-changing data. If you’re taking too long to gather and analyze the data, it may be too old to still be valuable.
When you open your Google Ads dashboard, you see a variety of metrics that help you measure your PPC campaign performance.
This means you can evaluate every aspect of your campaigns. However, it also adds to some confusion during analysis.
It isn’t always clear which metrics you should explore to answer your questions, especially when so many metrics are closely related, like impressions versus impression share.
Most of your PPC marketing data lives in your Google Ads account, but there are other locations that you need to gather data from also.
The most significant one, outside of your Google Ads account, is your website analytics. You need to know what happens after a user clicks your ad. This enables conversion tracking, lets you see conversion values and more.
When you combine multiple sources of data, there are additional challenges that arise. You have to ensure that no errors or discrepancies occur when you merge the data sets.
There are some steps you can take to overcome the above challenges. Automation plays a colossal role in improving your Google Ads management.
With these three steps, you’ll be able to streamline the process of converting raw data into actionable intelligence.
It’s easy to simplify the analysis process into a handful of stages, but the reality is that it’s much more complex than that.
Many small tasks have to go into collecting, preparing and analyzing the data. Not to mention the planning and execution of the analysis itself.
You should sit down with your team and discuss where the most considerable clogs in workflow appear.
What tasks require the most amount of time and attention? These are the tasks that you have the most to gain from if you can automate them.
Once you have your list, think about each task in terms of its importance and priority. Is this a task that you need to handle yourself, or are you comfortable having it automated?
There are thousands of marketing strategy tools out there that promise to automate your Google Ads account. Unfortunately, not all of these tools deliver on their promises.
The issue is that there are many degrees of automation and several techniques for implementing automation software in your campaign management processes.
Finding the perfect automation software for your needs can be challenging. Luckily, most third-party Google Ads tools include a trial or demo.
You will want to test out several solutions before investing in one.
We’ve covered this before, but it bears repeating. Once you acquire actionable insight, you need to apply that knowledge to improve your account. Then, evaluate the results to test whether it was a smart decision or not.
It’s also good to get in the habit of evaluating your entire analysis experience. Specifically, look for what went well and what didn’t.
Were there any roadblocks that slowed down your analysis? Ask yourself what you learned from these issues. It will help you avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
Remember, acquiring actionable intelligence is an ongoing process. The more efficiently you can do it, the better.
The bottom line is that you don’t want to do all of your PPC analysis by hand. The complexity and speed of your data mean manual analysis really isn’t feasible anymore. For larger accounts, it’s not even possible!
PPC Signal is one of the best PPC optimization tools for Google Ads users because it automatically monitors, detects and analyzes potential insights.
The system’s machine learning algorithms track any significant change in your campaigns, even down to the keyword level.
Whenever there is a trend, shift, outlier or anomaly occurring in your data, PPC Signal captures the intel and presents it to you as follows:
This is a complete insight, packaged and ready for action. In this small snapshot, you can see:
Your PPC Signal dashboard shows every complete insight, or signal, that the system recognizes.
With the PPC Signal tool, this dashboard becomes your main command center for improving your campaigns.
You can filter your active signals by several different parameters. You can filter by parts of your account (campaign, ad group or even individual keywords). Alternatively, you can filter by various dimensions, such as device types, the hour of the day or user location.
PPC Signal also allows you to separate notable changes in your account by which metric(s) are moving. The metric type filters help you swiftly hone in on changes to your KPIs.
For example, here’s a screenshot showing an advertiser filtering by the metric “clicks.” Suddenly, 21 active signals become only 5.
The PPC Signal dashboard has a lot of value by making it extremely simple to see every noteworthy change currently impacting your Google Ads account.
But, what happens when you find a change that you want to investigate?
Clicking the Explore button below any signal on your dashboard will open it to reveal a closer look. Here’s an example of an opened signal:
There are many settings, features and other tools on this page:
Overall, the PPC Signal system automatically takes you from raw data to complete, actionable intelligence. All you have to do is select an insight and act.
Actionable intelligence is the end goal when you analyze your marketing data. “Intelligence” means it is information or research that you’ve gathered, while “actionable” shows that the data indicates an action that you should take to improve performance. The more actionable intelligence you have, the easier it is to make swift changes to your account that improve performance. This keeps you one step ahead of your competition!
Detecting actionable intelligence is an ongoing process of collecting and analyzing new data as it is created. Turning your data into actionable intelligence starts with asking a question. By answering that question, you reveal previously unknown information that you can use to inform your decisions and take action. As long as you remain curious and keep asking questions, you’ll continue to find new, actionable PPC marketing insights.
Marketing data holds many challenges. It’s large, fast-moving, varied and comes from multiple sources. These challenges make a strong case for investing in automated marketing tools. Through automation, you can spend less time collecting, monitoring and analyzing the data because you have a machine learning tool handling all that for you. This gives you more time to ask critical analysis questions, explore the answers and reach deeper and more actionable intelligence.
Managing a PPC account on Google Ads — while it seems easy — is never an easy task. There are so many constant changes and moving parts that staying on top of it all on a daily basis is tiresome.
Yet, monitoring and analyzing your data are necessary steps for obtaining actionable intelligence.
What is actionable intelligence? To recap, actionable intel is information that you acquire through analysis that directly helps you improve your account performance.
It’s not just about knowing how your metrics are changing, but why they are and how you can fix it.
The best marketing automation software for obtaining actionable intelligence is PPC Signal.
Through sophisticated machine learning algorithms, PPC Signal gives you a steady supply of action-ready insights based on your latest Google Ads data.
This simplifies the PPC management process tremendously. It enables you to focus primarily on taking action, instead of manually monitoring and analyzing the data.
It’s actionable intelligence packed and delivered right to your inbox!
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