A PPC professional’s job goes beyond launching paid search campaigns.
An equally important task is to optimize and scale these campaigns for maximum effectiveness and impact.
This requires digging deep into performance data to uncover valuable insights that can inform optimization strategies.
The data from your paid search campaigns contains a wealth of insights waiting to be discovered. By analyzing metrics, keywords, competitive landscape, and user paths, you can identify opportunities to improve targeting, messaging, budgets, and overall campaign performance.
This guide will explain some key reports, tools, and analytics that can generate impactful insights to optimize your paid search efforts.
Harness the power of advertising platforms and campaigns
Our user-friendly advertising interfaces, Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, offer a wealth of powerful information if you know where and how to look for it.
Metrics matter
Analyze key metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), conversion rate (CVR), conversion volume, and cost-per-conversion across your account’s different goals and campaign types, and note any discrepancies or misalignments.
For example, let’s say you’re looking at a campaign and notice a high CTR along with a low CVR. What does this indicate?
It could mean that there are:
A mismatch between the messaging in your ad copy and your target audience. A mismatch in who your target audience is. Or the need to refine your landing page experience.
Testing will determine which element needs to be adjusted, but discovering this misalignment provides a starting point.
In another example, let’s look at cost per conversion. With comprehensive conversion settings that include conversion values, you can examine the cost per conversion of different conversion actions to understand the true value of a campaign.
If a campaign has a high overall cost per conversion, you may be inclined to turn it off.
If you notice that segmented actions have a low cost per conversion for a high priority action, you may be inclined to:
Adjust your conversion score (primary vs. secondary). Update landing pages to show more of the high priority action. Increase your campaign investment because it drives high-quality conversion actions.
Keywords are the cornerstone
Keywords are the foundation of a paid search account. Fundamental keyword research often determines the entire structure and targeting of an account.
Post-launch keyword analysis is a typical part of account maintenance and provides a window into several important insights.
I always start by doing an n-gram analysis – a simplified way to examine your keywords on a larger scale than looking at search query reports or keyword reports individually.
N-gram analysis allows you to break down and group your keyword sets into topics, making it easier and clearer to uncover hidden trends and areas of opportunity.
I like to use these breakdowns to identify which topics come up most frequently with particularly strong or weak performance (remember, metrics matter).
For strong performing themes, you may consider creating new campaigns or ad groups to prioritize messages, budget allocation, etc. For lower performers, you can incorporate negative phrase match keywords that align with your low-performing topics to save your ad spend and ensure you’re reaching the right audience.
Understand where it appears
Take a look at your auction data reports, they might surprise you. You often have an idea of who your direct competitors are, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only people in the ad auction you’re up against.
Reviewing your impression share through the auction data report regularly can help you uncover hidden insights that can help you identify your competitors, as well as target and refine your keywords.
A couple of things to keep in mind and what kinds of information they can uncover:
Newly listed advertisers that are aligned with your industry, product/service: New competition to monitor market share availability, competitor research, potential acquisition opportunity.
Newly listed advertisers that are not aligned to your industry, product or service: You may be targeting keywords that generate less relevant queries than ideal, either by match type or the term itself.
Large fluctuations in impression share (for you or other advertisers): This can indicate increased or decreased investment which can influence things like CPC, cost per conversion, and in turn your bidding strategies and ad spend budget allocations.
Dig Deeper: How to Improve PPC Campaign Performance: A Checklist
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Beyond the platform: Using Google Analytics 4 to dig deeper
In addition to the insights you can get from the platforms themselves, you can also use other analytics and reporting tools to uncover more holistic insights about paid search.
Many valuable insights can be found by digging deeper into your customers’ user journeys. Path to conversion reports in GA4 are the perfect tool for this, allowing you to see and understand the number of touchpoints a user takes before converting, the different channels they interact with on that path, and various associated metrics.
This information helps you understand how paid search interacts with other marketing channels, allowing you to identify gaps or the need for additional paid search coverage and develop a holistic omnichannel approach.
For example, if you notice that the most common path to conversion is a path that includes Paid Search > Organic > Paid Search, this may indicate that users are not far enough down the funnel to make a decision the first time they see an ad. and are conducting more in-depth research before converting.
You can use this information to add more nurturing elements to your advertising strategy, adjust your landing page content, and more.
Dig Deeper: How to combine GA4 and Google Ads for powerful paid search results
Revealing the untapped potential in your paid search accounts
There is an endless amount of information you can get from your paid search accounts. Some of the ones I found shocking and shared here for you are:
Focus on key metrics and how they relate to each other, campaign goals, and campaign types. Use n-gram analysis to uncover keyword themes, trends, and areas of opportunity. Consider the Auction Insights report to monitor competitive activity, changes in investment and look for potential coverage gaps. Use Google Analytics 4 conversion path reporting to understand where paid search fits into the big picture.
This is by no means a complete list of strategies for uncovering hidden gems in your paid search accounts, but it’s a good place to start.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
