As a PPC advertiser, a big part of your job is PPC analysis: an in-depth understanding of how your campaigns are performing and finding ways to improve them.
If you run Google Ads and want to know if you are growing in the right direction, you look at your important KPI metrics regularly and not wait for something to be broken in order to get your attention towards it.
How to check PPC campaign performance in the Google Ads editor?
Let’s say you’d like to know how your campaign has performed this quarter as compared to the last quarter. You usually check the number of clicks, impressions, and conversions you received this quarter and compare them with the previous quarter.
To do this in the Google Ads editor, follow the steps below or watch this video.
1. Go to the Account Overview tab, and enable the comparison mode from the date selector.
2. Select the date ranges.
3. You can see the difference between the KPI metrics on the top.
4. To go a level deeper, and understand which metric is the cause of the issue, you can go to the campaign or ad group or the Keywords section on the left side of the editor.
For example, if the conversions have reduced this quarter as compared to the previous quarter, it could be because of the number of clicks or Conv. rate. Then the next step would be to analyze these two metrics.
The metric that has dipped the most needs to be analyzed further. For example, if conversions are less because your account received fewer clicks, the next step would be to check impressions, avg. CPC, etc. in other words, the metrics that can impact ‘clicks’ the most. And this process goes on.
But, here’s the issue with this method.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact problem with your campaign performance with a Google Ads editor.
The data we’ve shown in the video is only from a demo account that only has a few ad groups. Imagine analyzing campaign performance in a bigger account with dozens of campaigns, hundreds of ad groups, and hundreds of keywords. It can be as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack.
So is there a better way to analyze your PPC campaign performance?
Absolutely! Enter PPC Investigator.
What is the PPC Investigator?
The PPC Investigator is an insights tool that’ll help you find exactly which element in a given account caused a metric to increase or decrease, and whether it’s a keyword, placement, or an entire network that caused the changes.
It has two components:
- Cause Chart
- Root Cause Analysis
Cause Chart
The Cause Chart is based on the fact that the performance of every metric depends on the performance of other underlying metrics. It uses the relationships between different metrics to show potential causality.
At the time of writing this article, the Cause chart is available for Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Amazon Ads. We’re working on a version for Facebook ads too.
Root Cause Analysis
After identifying which metric needs to be worked on, the Root Cause Analysis goes a step further and highlights the exact Campaigns/Ad groups/Product partition/Keywords, etc. that were responsible for the change in an account.
It shows top movers that are significant contributors to the change in the account when compared across the two date ranges. You can view the top three positive and negative movers for a particular account.
There’s a strong reason why we built the PPC investigator. If you’re interested keep reading or skip to the next section.
What’s the philosophy behind the PPC Investigator?
At Optmyzr, we’ve always been a company that values entrepreneurship qualities. That goes with our employees and our tools too.
The PPC Investigator is one such tool that runs on the concept of finding issues faster and fixing them. It lets you ask Optmyzr questions to understand why something is working or not working as per your expectations.
This idea was derived from the ‘5 Whys technique’ by Taiichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System, which led to the process of lean manufacturing in the U.S.
I read about it in the book, ‘The Lean Startup’ by Eric Ries. The 5 Whys technique helps you get to the root cause of a problem and provides a learning opportunity rather than playing the blame game.
The way to use this technique is whenever you find a major bug or issue in your product, you fix it first and then chart out the reasons by asking 5 continuous whys to drill down to the root cause.
It’s very important for start-ups to find root causes faster and fix them sooner as it cuts down overall expenses and saves valuable time.
Now, why are we talking about startups here? Because there’s a common link between managing your PPC accounts and your team: identifying the root cause as soon as possible and fixing it.
How to check campaign performance using PPC Investigator?
The video below explains how you can use this tool for PPC analysis.
Skip to the 4:00 part to learn about the PPC Investigator.
You can ask this tool, “Why did my clicks change during this quarter as compared to the previous quarter?”
Or, if you want to be specific about the date range, you can construct a question like, “Why did my Cost per conversion change during Aug. 10, 2022 to Aug. 15, 2022 compared to July 5, 2021 to July 10, 2021?”
And then just wait for the answer.
You can see in the image above how the tool starts with one question or one ‘Why’ from you and then charts out the reasons by asking multiple whys in the process automatically.
Or if you’d like to know how your traffic from mobile devices has changed over say the last 30 days, this tool can figure out the root causes that are improving performance on mobile devices. This insight will help you plan future strategies for different devices.
Now, you need not necessarily use this tool only to identify problems in performance. You’d also want to know what’s working for you. For example, in the same image above, the display impression share has actually increased, which helps you understand what you are doing right.
A way toward effective PPC performance analysis
The PPC Investigator is a favorite among our users and we don’t doubt why. If you’re serious about learning how your campaign performance has changed, you should definitely give this tool a try.
Try out the tool with our 14-day free trial. You can also play around with our other tools to help you get the most out of your ad spend.
