Welcome to Part 2 of Making Sense of Your PPC Data, where we take a deeper dive into some more nuanced PPC metrics, and more importantly learn how to digest everything, visualize it, and turn your data into actionable improvements!
Deeper Dive
The truth is that the metrics discussed in Part 1 of this blog are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to PPC data. To be able to make continued account improvements over the long term, you’ll need to dive deeper into your Google Ads and Google Analytics data to better predict where and when you have the best chance to make a sale. You will still be using your basic metrics and conversion data as your benchmark for success, and bid adjustments as your method of optimization, but to truly dial in your ads you’ll need to look beyond your campaign and keyword data at some more nuanced metrics.
Three often overlooked optimizations you can make to your PPC advertising account are ad scheduling, location targeting, and device bid adjustments. Each allows you to set bid adjustments beyond your original keyword bid, allowing you to bid more or less depending on when a user searches, where a user searches from, and what device a user is using.
After your ads have been running for a bit, and have generated some solid data, Google Ads provides a lot of very valuable information for each individual click. You can segment your data by both time of day and day of week to understand when users are searching, when they are clicking, and when they are booking. By taking ROI data for each of these time slots, you can set up an optimized ad schedule with bid increases during the hours and days that a user is most likely to book and bid decreases when a booking and strong ROI seems less likely.
By adding these more advanced bid adjustments to your account, you can really start to optimize your ad spend, focusing more on proven ROI winners while limiting your wasted spend. For example, imagine you have a $1 Max. CPC bid for a keyword. You also know that searches from San Francisco produce strong a ROI (+25% bid adjustment), searches at 6pm on a Wednesday produce a strong ROI (+50% bid adjustment), and searches from desktop computers produce a strong ROI (+25% bid adjustment). All of these bid adjustments add together, so if someone searches for your keyword from SF at 6pm on a Wednesday, on their desktop, your $1 max CPC increases to $2 (+100%), as you actively set bid increases for these conditions. Remember when we said there were many factors that come into play when determining CPC?
Not only do these more nuanced metrics help you optimize your account, but they can help with other areas of your business as well. You can find the perfect time to send an email blast to maximize bookings. You can determine pain points on your mobile website to find areas of improvement. You can determine the best locations to focus your print advertising or place billboards. All of this info is additional value added from your PPC campaigns beyond your ROI.
And So Much More
Congratulations! That’s everything there is to know about PPC data. Just kidding, if we were to cover everything, this would probably be a 20-part blog series. Instead, let’s go over some final metrics that can help you truly understand your PPC account.
Quality Score (QS) is an important metric that Google uses to determine where your ad shows vs. competitors, also known as ad rank. While your keyword Max. CPC bids (as well as additional bid adjustments) determine how much you are willing to spend per click, QS is equally as important to determine how high in the search results your ad shows. It’s Google’s way of saying “I think this is a relevant ad for this search,” and is a rating from 1 to 10. Ad Rank is calculated by multiplying your Max. CPC bid and your QS. Thus, a $2 keyword bid with an 8/10 QS (16) will show higher in the search results than a $10 bid for the same keyword with a 1/10 QS (10).
Many factors go into determining QS, and it’s important to try and optimize for QS as much as possible. Historical performance for keywords plays a big role, so if Google knows a specific keyword performs well in your account, it will get a better QS. Additionally, a high CTR on your keywords and ads improves QS. If Google knows that people see your ads and click them, they know they must be relevant. Landing page performance is also important. If users click your ad and immediately bounce from your website, Google will deem this as a problem and reduce your Quality Score.
Speaking of website performance, looking at your on-site Google Analytics metrics is a very important step towards improving your PPC advertising account. You can make as many account optimizations as you’d like, but if searchers have a bad user experience once they get to your site, you are leaving money on the table. You should be looking at things like bounce rate, average time on site, and pages per session, making sure users are getting to your site and staying there. Additionally, you should make sure your checkout flow is going smoothly, so that users who are getting to the checkout page aren’t having issues completing their booking.
Running a competitor analysis is also beneficial in understanding where you stand vs. your competition for ad space. Google allows you to see your own search impression share, as well as competitors search impression shares for your keywords. If you have a 60% search impression share for your keywords, that means your ad shows 60% of the time someone searches for one of your keywords. The other 40% of the time you’ve either run out of budget for the day, or competitors outbid you for the ad space. By checking competitors’ search impression share, you can see how aggressive they are for your keywords, and how their aggressiveness has changed over time. If you see competitors getting more and more aggressive, and thus increasing their search impression share, it may be time to increase bids to remain relevant.
There are also conversion attribution models, search term reports, A/B testing, ad extension analysis, etc., etc. The moral of the story is that there’s no shortage of ways to analyze your keywords and ads and improve your ROI. Understanding each metric is time consuming, but important towards ensuring your account is running like a well-oiled machine.
Data Digestion
Now that you have all the data you could ever want, what do you do with it? How can you possibly keep track of it all? For starters, Google Ads provides a great user interface, with access to each and every data point. You can segment your data however you’d like, adjust timeframes, compare year over year, and make all of your budget and bid adjustments in one place. You can also import your conversion data from Google Analytics to bring in online lead and booking data.
That being said, Google Ads has its limitations as well. For starters, despite being a user-friendly interface, it still takes time and effort to truly understand all of its capabilities. It’s meant more for full time PPC specialists than your average business owner. Additionally, you are limited to bringing in your online lead and booking data, meaning you are potentially missing out on some offline conversions that can give you a more accurate picture of your ROI and CPL. It certainly is able to provide usable data, but your best data should be housed elsewhere, in easy to visualize reports with blended data.
Data blending allows you to bring in data from multiple sources to give yourself as accurate a picture as possible of your account performance. You can bring in data from Google Ads, Bing Ads, Google Analytics, call tracking services, CRMs, property management software, as well as any other data source you have. Then, using your preferred method, you can blend all of your data together to give yourself the full scope of what you are spending on your ads, and what you are getting in return. With this data automatically updating on a daily basis, you now have all of your most important metrics in one place, allowing you to do with it what you’d like.
Once your data is all in one place, it’s time to visualize it in an easily digestible format. Google Data Studio is a great free option for this. You can customize your reports to your liking and focus in on your most important metrics while leaving out the fluff. Start out with your basic metrics and conversion data to ensure things are running smoothly and you are producing a solid ROI. Then, progressively go into more and more detail that can be used to improve the account. How are search campaigns doing vs. remarketing campaigns? How do our metrics stack up against the same dates last year? Including week over week and month over month data is also a great way to show continued progress, as well as alert you to any seasonality changes that may occur in your specific market.
As your report goes on, you can get deeper into your data. Campaign and Keyword performance, with every conversion point you can imagine, can get you closer to your true ROI and allow you to better focus your spend. Deeper dives into your most important Google Analytics metrics can teach you how your website is performing and whether adjustments need to be made. Visualizing geographic click and booking data makes it easy to identify top performing locations, as well as locations that eat up spend without producing results.
A well-made PPC report should be your one-stop shop to understand how your account has been performing in both the short and long term, how that performance compares to previous years, what areas of your account are specifically driving your conversions, and what optimizations can be made to improve performance further. At the same time, it needs to be easy to digest, something that doesn’t require a PPC expert to understand. See below for what a sample interactive Bizcor PPC report looks like (use the arrows in the bottom left corner to navigate through the pages):
Hopefully this blog helps you make sense of your PPC data! If you have any questions, we’re always happy to help. Reach out to info@bizcor.com for more information!
