Over time, you may have noticed that your ad performance goes up and down frequently. Why is that?
The best way to monitor your ads is to create reports. Don’t be discouraged! Reports will help you identify what needs to be fixed so you can improve your results. Over time, you’ll get better and better at creating these reports, and you’ll be faster and more efficient. ?
Here are five things you can do to monitor your ad performance so you can work on implementing optimizations.
Creating Reports Can Be Difficult And Time-Consuming!
You should definitely take the time to measure your ad performance so you can keep up with what’s working and what’s not working. Those little bits of information help you optimize your ads and make them even better!
First, you need to collect data which comes in the form of reports. This is something every digital marketer has to do regularly. Reporting is a challenge for everyone!
Find out the value of a paid search and find out how the optimization you make to your ads is actually making a difference. You can track data on how a user has interacted with your ads. But the problem lies in making those reports quickly and knowing what created the changes you found in your reports ?
Automate Your Reporting Process
One solution is to use automation to create reports. It’s not quite as scary as it may sound. You can use the help of Google Data Studio.
This is a free tool. It brings all your data into one place, and it’s directly connected to platforms like Google Ads. Using Data Studio shortens your time spent on creating reports immensely ?
After your data source is connected to Data Studio, you then create a report that explains your campaign performance.
The Data Studio has several visuals built-in that you can use. Some common ones are bar charts or scatter plots. These are invaluable. You not only reduce the time spent creating reports, but also you reduce time analyzing the results. You can then easily identify what the changes were every week and why they worked so well or not so well!
Using a flow chart is a great tool to show off your insights. It’s easy to follow and understand what all your data means. You can see any fluctuations in the performance of your ads and they help you focus on what tasks you’ll work on next in your ads to improve ad performance ?
What Do You Do After You Figure Out What Caused The Drop In Performance?
First off, don’t panic! Seeing drops in your ad performance is quite normal. Even professionals see it happen all the time.
Once you’ve set up your report and flow chart, you’ll be able to see what caused the drop in conversions each week compared to other weeks when conversions were higher.
It could be that your campaigns were capturing lower-quality users. This is a good metric to work on and not that hard to fix.
Another problem might be that the user experience was worse than the week before. Still fixable!
So how do you improve the quality of users ? that you’re targeting?
Related: What To Do When Your Ad Strategy Is All Wrong
Perform an Analysis
In order to change the quality of users clicking on your ads and following through, you’ll have to ask a few questions to find the root causes that made this change from the week before.
For example:
- Are people using search queries that don’t align with my business in Google? Is that what’s causing my campaign ads to trigger for those people?
- Have there been any changes to your landing pages for your campaigns in the last few weeks?
Once you answer these questions you can then analyze your ad performance more clearly. This will help you fix whatever needs fixing in your ads so those drops in performance won’t happen next week ?
What if there weren’t any changes to your landing pages recently? Then it makes it easier to focus on what keywords people have used in search engines. Now you can perform a search query analysis and find search terms that are irrelevant to your business.
After your analysis is complete, you can eliminate those keywords by using the negative keyword section in Google ads. You’ll probably find some good keywords you may want to use to help improve your quality score and ad performance.
Implement Your Optimizations And Check Your Ad Performance
Now that you’ve gone through and made those changes to your ads, you’re going to want to know if those changes are actually getting results. You can’t just change your ad settings and hope for the best.
Keep track of your optimizations. That’s how you’ll figure out what caused your ad performance to increase! Keeping track of all those optimizations will help you easily see how they affected your ads.
First, use your existing Google Data Studio report. Examine the flow chart and look for changes where you think they should be showing up.
If you made the changes from your search query analysis, for example, this is what you want to check the next time you run your report. This is if your goal is to improve conversion rates
Narrow down the campaigns that were affected by that specific analysis and find out what the changes are in CVR (conversion rate). Did it improve? Then that’s a great result!
Did you see an increase in overall conversions? Awesome! Now you’ve fixed your problem of why conversions and ad performance dropped.
Hopefully, this whole process won’t seem too daunting. It may seem like a lot of steps to take, but once you get your systems in place, it takes very little time. With practice, you’ll get even faster! This is how you can monitor your ad performance and achieve greater results.