Do you manage your PPC ads in Microsoft Excel? If so, you have an advantage. Excel is a powerful way to manage your ads, provided you know how to get the most out of your application. The more organized you are, the easier it is to accurately calculate your PPC ROI.
Managing Google PPC ads requires numerous and large calculations, all of which are easily handled by Excel. The process of learning advanced Excel tips can be time-consuming, but here are some ways to streamline your efforts and maximize ease of use.
However, you set up your Excel sheet to make calculations, it’s helpful to set your cell reference to display as currency rather than a plain text number. Sure, you can look at “8.00” and know it means “$8,” but it’s easier just to have that formula cell display the number in dollars. Using Excel tips like this ensures clarity in your Excel workbook.
Ideally, you’ll set your cells to display currency before you enter your data entry in the respective data tab. However, there will be times when you’ll need to change existing data into currency, and that’s where keyboard shortcuts come in handy.
You can use your mouse to navigate Excel’s menu and change cells to currency, but that’s a tedious process. It’s easier to use the ctrl+shift+4 shortcut. Just highlight the cell(s) you want to display in currency and then use this shortcut to quickly create custom number formats.
Another useful keyboard shortcut is one that turns the contents of cells into a percentage. This shortcut is ctrl+shift+5. This is useful when you want to look at certain numbers as a percentage rather than a whole number, but you don’t want those numbers displayed as a percentage permanently. This is especially helpful when applying data validation rules or trying to filter data efficiently in your Excel sheet. If you’re working on advanced formulas such as index and match functions, having properly formatted data is crucial for accurate results.
Sometimes you’ll need to calculate the sums of many individual rows or columns, and if you only have to do this once, it’s not a big deal to manually enter the Excel formulas. However, when you need to perform this type of calculation multiple times, it will become cumbersome.
You can automatically calculate the sum of a row or column by clicking in an empty cell and using the shortcut alt+the equal sign. If you’re on a Mac, you’ll need to use command+alt/option+the equal sign.
VLOOKUP is one of the most important, yet underused functions in Excel. This function allows you to reference data from other spreadsheets and incorporate that into your calculations. This means you don’t have to cram all of your data for every ad campaign (and corresponding ad copy) you run into one spreadsheet file just to be able to perform calculations.
Using this function does require setting the foundation, but once you set it up, your calculations between files will be smooth. To learn more about how this function works and to learn how to set it up, watch this tutorial video.
“Concatenate” means to combine or join together and is one of the best functions Excel provides for managing your PPC ads. With this function, you can combine the contents of multiple cells into one cell. You can also use it to add words or symbols to the end of multiple existing cells. For managing PPC ads, this function will speed up your work. Here are some examples.
When creating broad match modified keywords, you need to add a plus symbol to the beginning of your keyword. This isn’t easy to do manually, even when you use the copy and paste functions. The concatenate function makes this a breeze.
Just add the following function to an adjacent cell:
=CONCATENATE(“+”, B2)
For all cells below B2 (or whatever cell you’re starting with), use the fill handle to copy the formula to all the other cells.
When you’re building a list of keyword variations, you’ll benefit by using concatenate. For example, say your company sells socks for men, women, and kids. You’re going to come up with keyword variations that are the same for all three of these categories. To create your list quickly, start by typing your main keywords vertically in a column like this:
Mens
Womens
Childrens
Now, say you have the following variations: wool socks, cotton socks, hiking socks, work socks. You can use the concatenate function to add “wool socks” to each of your main categories, and then continue doing the same with the other types of socks you sell.
If you want to get even more advanced you can perform filter and search functions in Excel using pivot tables.
It won’t take long before your PPC ad data fills up your Excel spreadsheet and requires scrolling down the page. There’s nothing wrong with this, except for the fact that you will lose sight of your column headings. If you work with your spreadsheet regularly, you’ll probably have the headings memorized, but memory isn’t always reliable. You don’t want to look at your data one day and mistake your CTR column for your conversion rate. Additionally, if you ever need someone else to work with your data, they could get frustrated.
The solution is to freeze the rows at the top of your sheets. When a row is frozen, it will remain at the top of the sheet as you scroll down, so you’ll always have a proper reference for what you’re looking at no matter how far down you scroll.
To freeze multiple rows, highlight the row directly below the last row you want frozen. Then go to the “View” option in the main menu and select “Freeze Panes.” Choose the option “freeze pane” and every row above the one you selected will be frozen.
To freeze only your top row, you can just go to the “View” option in the main menu, select “Freeze Panes,” and choose the option “freeze top row.” Alternatively, you can use the shortcut alt+W+F+R to freeze the top row.
If you want to freeze the first column, go to the “View” option in the main menu, select “Freeze Panes,” and choose the option “freeze top column.”
When you need to count the characters in your longtail keywords, Len comes in handy. For instance, when you have exact matches longer than three words you can program it to add that to your modified broad match keywords. Len is best used in conjunction with concatenate to fill in the modifiers.
Sometimes you’ll need to apply formulas to additional cells, but doing this manually takes a long time. The trick here is to place the formula in your first cell so that it performs the first calculation, and then hover your mouse over the cell. You’ll see a plus sign appear in the bottom right corner, and when you double click on that plus sign, it will automatically calculate the remainder of cells.
Find and replace is one of the oldest life-saving functions around. It helps if you’ve accidentally clichéd and pasted something incorrectly, but it also helps you change words when you just need to make a change.
When you only have a couple of instances of a word, it’s not a big deal to change them manually. However, when you have ten or more, including hundreds or even thousands of instances, using the find and replace function will make your life easier. For instance, you might decide you want to turn all of your broad match keywords into a modified broad keyword. Use find and replace to add that plus sign in front of each instance of your keywords.
When you’re managing mass amounts of PPC data, you need a tool that will perform automatic calculations and make it easy for you to play with your data to crunch numbers in different ways. Excel is an excellent tool for the job, provided you take advantage of some of these PPC Excel tips, shortcuts and functions.
There’s not much you can do about the changing seasons.
As the months progress, the weather changes. Holidays come and go. And if your business is seasonal, even in a small or indirect way, there will be times when your marketing and advertising efforts simply don’t work as well as they would in other seasons. Seasonal campaigns are particularly affected by these fluctuations.
Maybe you’re an HVAC company that sees significantly lower seasonal demand in fall and spring when compared to summer. Or maybe you sell pools, along with related equipment and accessories, and winter is practically a dead time for you. Understanding seasonal trends is key to planning for these dips and maintaining consistent campaign performance.
Whatever the case, you’re not going to see as much value during your slow times.
So how do you beat these PPC campaign seasonality issues?
Some seasonal patterns in business are totally intuitive and predictable. If you sell Christmas decorations or specialize in winter holiday apparel, you’re going to see sales spike in November and December – without much activity the rest of the year. If you own a landscaping business in an area with cold winter weather, you shouldn’t expect much activity until spring. Seasonal factors like these make seasonality adjustments a necessary part of your business strategy.
But some seasonal fluctuations are less predictable – and harder to understand.
Many businesses see significant and consistent drops in conversions, sales, and other KPIs at around the same time every year – despite little to no logical reasoning to support the trend. For example, you might notice plummeting sales at the beginning of February, with restoration to normalcy around mid-March, every year of operations. This could be tied to changes in consumer behavior or other unseen seasonal factors.
How do you begin to identify and understand these patterns?
The simplest analytics tool is to study a year-over-year chart (and preferably, several that cover different variables). Look at as many years as possible and watch for observable trends. Is there a month or series of months when you see a seasonal event causing a boom in sales? Or especially low sales? Take a look at not only sales and revenue, but conversions, ad traffic, organic traffic, and other factors.
At this point, you should be able to identify your biggest seasonal issues. It’s also important to review whether bidding strategies or landing page optimization can help mitigate the effects of wasted ad spend during slower months. It could be valuable to analyze the root causes for these seasonal disruptions, but that’s not always the case; sometimes, it’s enough to simply know that a trend exists. The good news here is that as long as you’re willing to experiment and continuously make progress, you should eventually close the gap between your best and worst seasons.
Here’s some additional good news; whatever seasonal issues you face are probably also affecting your top competitors. That means they’re struggling with the same things you are. It also means you have a critical opportunity to surpass their performance.
Part of your seasonal optimization strategy should be pushing your campaign to do its best during your peak busy season. When do sales usually spike? And how can you make sales increase even further?
The most straightforward answer here is to increase your spending. Assuming you can keep all other variables consistent, including the relevance of your audience, the quality of your landing pages, your conversion rates, etc., a bigger budget should lead to much better results.
If you face significant competition during the busy season, this may not be a viable option for you, as ad spending can become cripplingly exorbitant when there are too many people competing for the same group of keywords. Here, if you don’t have the budget to compete, your best strategy is some form of avoidance. That could mean targeting a different demographic, targeting people at a different stage of the sales funnel, or even offering a different selection of products and services so you’re not trapped in a pit with a bigger, more threatening competitor.
The bigger issue for most brands is finding a way to make up for seasonal slowdown.
Just as “everyone is a genius in a bull market,” every advertiser is brilliant during the busy season. It’s the slow season that’s a much bigger problem.
Many advertisers confront this problem by simply reducing their budget or minimizing their marketing efforts during this slow season. Intuitively, this makes some sense; if you’re not seeing adequately profitable results from your efforts, there’s no reason to spend as much as you did before.
However, you can get an edge over your competitors and create more value for your brand by adjusting your PPC advertising strategy specifically for the slow season.
These are the strategies that can help you:
Micro conversions aren’t as valuable as full conversions, but they’re much easier to get and they’re less expensive to manage. During your off season, micro conversions are a potentially lucrative way to keep your campaign running – and the real bonus comes weeks or months later, when you’re carefully nurtured early-sales-funnel micro converts eventually decide to purchase from you.
If you want to increase the effectiveness of your display ads, or make the most of a limited budget, it’s a good idea to take advantage of multiple networks simultaneously. Not only will you broaden your reach, you’ll also be able to take advantage of the most cost-effective advertising opportunities available. Microsoft and other secondary networks may not have the notoriety of Google, but they also have less competition and, in many cases, lower prices.
Are you looking for more advice on how to properly address seasonality issues in your PPC campaign?
Or are you ready to increase your budget for this powerful advertising strategy?
PPC.co can help you with everything from initial strategy to ongoing experimentation and optimization. Contact us for your free proposal today!
For obvious reasons, we love to promote the power and value of pay per click (PPC) advertising.
No matter your industry, the size of your business, or the goals of your advertising strategy, a PPC campaign can give you the reach and reliable lead generation you need to gain momentum.
But investing exclusively in one PPC channel is inefficient.
And so is investing exclusively in PPC as a lead generation strategy.
The solution is cross channel lead generation.
But what exactly is cross channel lead generation? And how should it apply to your PPC advertising lead generation strategy?
The term “cross channel” refers to coordinating efforts across multiple different mediums or platforms, and it can apply both within the world of PPC advertising and outside of it.
Within PPC advertising, you can use cross channel lead generation to display your ads across multiple different platforms and networks, such as Google, Bing, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can manage several different PPC ad campaigns interdependently, taking advantage of a wide range of tools and techniques to get the greatest value from each ad you place.
Outside of PPC, cross channel lead generation includes a variety of both inbound and outbound lead generation strategies. For example, in addition to your cross channel PPC ads, you can practice cold calling, cold emailing, SEO, and drip email marketing.
We’ll be exploring both sides of this equation but will primarily focus on cross channel lead generation within the PPC realm.
Why should you consider cross channel lead generation?
Now let’s dig into the details of how you can practice cross channel lead generation with PPC advertising.
Your first step is to decide on which complementary channels to include. You’ll need to do some research upfront here, studying your target demographics as well as your competitors to figure out which channels might be the most promising.
That said, try not to overthink this. None of these marketing channels require an extensive commitment, and you’ll be reshuffling your budget in the future anyway. If a channel doesn’t work, you can always cut it in the future.
Next, if you haven’t already, define your sales funnel and sales cycle.
Your sales cycle applies to individual leads in your pipeline; it’s a description of the process the average lead follows to eventually become a paying customer (or buy a new product from your business). It might go something like Prospecting > Initial Connection > Presentation > Overcoming Objections > Close.
Your sales funnel is somewhat similar, describing the average path your customers follow on their journey to become customers, but it has a higher-level, more aggregated view. A sales funnel might unfold in phases like Awareness > Research > Consideration/Comparison > Decision.
It’s important to understand both of these so you can better contextualize the behavior of your users and better allocate your budget. With proper planning, you can design and display advertisements for different types of prospects, based on where they are in the sales funnel.
We’ll take a closer look at these strategic decisions in the next section, but for now, focus on defining what the phases of your sales cycle and sales funnel are. These conceptual tools look a bit different for every business, so consider making modifications to any templates you find.
Strongly differentiate between your “high funnel” and “low funnel” promotions – and use your advertising networks accordingly.
A high funnel promotion is designed to appeal to users higher up in your sales funnel; these are people who probably aren’t aware that your brand exists and they may not even know they have a problem that needs to be solved. Messages like “Are you spending too much on HR needs?” and promotions of educational content are excellent here; the goal is to raise awareness, stimulate interest, and begin nurturing your leads.
A low funnel promotion is designed to users lower in your sales funnel; these are people who already know your brand and are getting ready to make a purchase. Special offers, discounts, and other incentives to close the deal are ideal here.
There are, of course, other stages in the middle of your sales funnel, too. But high funnel and low funnel promotions are a great place to start.
Next, distinguish between platforms and advertisements meant to push your audience toward something they haven’t heard of before and those meant to pull your audience towards something they’re already familiar with.
If a customer has never heard of your brand before, they have no reason to search for it. They may also be totally unaware of whatever problem you’re trying to solve. If you want to get their attention in your cross channel marketing campaign, you’ll need to reach out to them in some generic, mass-marketed way through multiple marketing channels, including offline channels like print ads, direct mail, or event sponsorships. This is considered a push promotion.
If a customer is already acutely aware of the problem they need to solve, and they’ve done at least some research to make a purchasing decision, you’ll need to reach out to them when they’re actively searching for your brand or a solution like yours. Using tools like Google Analytics, your marketing teams can track user behavior and refine strategies to improve engagement and conversions. This is considered a pull promotion.
Now let’s combine these ideas.
For customers high in your sales funnel, push promotions are best. You’ll begin introducing your brand, you’ll reach people who may not have heard of you, and you can begin warming up these potential leads. Social media networks are typically good for this, as long as you know who you’re targeting.
For customers low in your sales funnel, pull promotions are best. You’ll capitalize on search intent, placing your advertisements for keywords and phrases that indicate purchasing intent or at least serious research on the subject.
It’s a great strategy for using each platform/channel to its fullest potential – and it’s only going to get better once you have more data available to you.
As you begin experimenting with different channels and approaches, attempt to estimate your “baseline” costs per lead. In other words, how much would you pay for each quality lead generated by a given strategy?
If you’ve been practicing PPC advertising on a single channel for some time, you probably have a reasonable basis for this projection. How much does it cost, approximately, to generate a lead under normal circumstances?
This is going to serve as your comparative foundation when planning for lead generation across other channels. If it costs $5 to generate a typical lead on your primary platform, but it only costs $1 to generate a high funnel lead on a competing platform, you know this secondary channel/strategy is worth pursuing. If it costs $10, you know not to bother.
Your measurements don’t need to be precise at the beginning of your campaign; this cost basis is meant to loosely guide you in your early decision making. Objective analytics and precision come later, once you’ve had a chance to run more experiments and gather more data.
Across all your channels and platforms, you need to commit to measuring every significant variable. Most PPC ad platforms (and most lead generation strategies in general) make these tools free and easy to use – you just have to go through the effort of using them.
These are some of the most important KPIs to measure across your campaigns:
As you gather more data, you’ll get a better sense for the strengths and weaknesses of each platform, the power of your spending, and the behavioral patterns of your most important demographics. And with this information, you can reallocate your budget to maximize your ROI.
Are you ready to start a cross-channel PPC campaign of your own?
Are you interested in boosting the value of your existing PPC ad strategy?
We have seasoned experts who can help you from start to finish. Contact us for a free proposal today!
What is the gold standard key performance indicator (KPI) for most of your marketing and advertising campaigns?
You can measure traffic. You can analyze user behavior. You can track spending. And all of these variables are important.
But if you’re like most marketers, your attention is disproportionately fixated on conversions.
There’s some good reason for this; unlike these other variables, conversions are tied to actual value. When a user is converted, it means your company is either generating revenue or that it’s taken a meaningful step toward generating revenue.
But in the realm of pay per click (PPC) advertising, conversions aren’t everything. In addition to standard conversions, you should be tracking, measuring, and carefully considering “micro conversions.”
So, what exactly are micro conversions for PPC lead generation? And how do you use them effectively?
Let’s start by exploring why conventional conversions aren’t everything.
Imagine a conventional user behavior path. A user sees your ad, they click on it, they visit your landing page, and eventually, they convert. In a mainstream context, conversions usually refer to meaningful, revenue-generating actions like purchasing a product, signing up for a service, or filling out a form For more information.
It’s easy to see why this is meaningful to track. The higher your conversion rate is, the more valuable your landing page is; high conversion rates can support higher advertising spending and further growth free or business, while lower conversion rates can guide you to further optimizations.
But let’s imagine a less immediately understandable, but still impactful user behavior path.
A user sees your ad, they click on it, and they visit your landing page, just like in our earlier example. But they’re not truly convinced they need your product, and even if they were, they’ve never heard of your brand before. Instead of converting, they leave.
A few days later, they face a specific problem that your product is potentially capable of solving. They conduct a search for your business, remembering your brand name, and they read a bit more about your business and your core products, gathering more information as part of their due diligence. They’re still not convinced, but they’re thinking about your product seriously.
A week after that, this user revisits your website directly and eventually buys your product.
Here, we finally have a meaningful conversion, but if we only track this process conventionally, we will attribute this conversion only to a direct traffic visit. In reality, the conversion is at the end of a long chain of events – and this long chain of events started with a “micro conversion.”
What is a micro conversion in the world of PPC advertising?
This definition is somewhat subjective, but a micro conversion is typically considered any meaningful action taken by a user that wouldn’t count as a normal, full conversion – but could still result in desired behavior from that user in the near future.
It’s easiest to understand this through example. Here are some common examples of micro conversions that most brands experience.
Obviously, securing a micro conversion isn’t a guarantee that you’re going to secure a full conversion in the future. Accordingly, we can’t consider micro conversions to be as valuable or as meaningful as traditional conversion rate optimization services.
However, if we better understand and analyze micro conversions in the proper context, we can optimize our campaigns to win more of them and incorporate them into our other calculations more accurately.
For example, let’s say that we discover, through analysis, that a micro conversion results in a purchase approximately 35 percent of the time. If the average value of a conversion is $1,000, we can assume the average value of a micro conversion is $350.
With this information, we can optimize our ads, landing pages, and other materials to maximize micro conversions similarly to how we would maximize traditional conversions. If we can get a sufficiently high percentage of our visitors to micro convert, in addition to fully converting, our campaigns can become much more valuable.
So, how do you measure and analyze micro conversions in the context of your PPC campaign?
Here’s some good news. You can set up and track micro conversion data in your Google Ads campaign the same way you would set up and track regular conversions. You’ll just have to create new metrics for each micro conversion idea you want to track.
If you want the micro conversion to apply to all of your campaigns, treat it as a primary conversion action. If you want the micro conversion to only apply to selected campaigns, create it as a secondary action.
From that point, you can group all your micro conversions together so they’re all tracked in the same column in your reports, or you can look at each individual goal specifically. Using Google Analytics, you can gain deeper insights into how these micro conversions contribute to your key performance indicators (KPIs).
One unfortunate downside of incorporating micro conversions into your campaign is that they could disrupt your ability to track and compare historical data; you won’t be able to make an apples-to-apples comparison if you start defining your conversions in a different way.
What steps can you take to improve your PPC lead generation with micro conversions?
These are some of the most important strategies:
The true value of tracking and analyzing your micro conversions is feeding you information that you can use to make your campaign more valuable over time. If you better understand the user behavior of “micro converted” users, you can make your landing page significantly more valuable.
Depending on your business, your niche, and your goals, that could mean creating separate landing pages for different target audiences, complete with different keyword groups, and with different goals; one could focus almost exclusively on full conversions, while the other focuses on micro conversions and audiences who aren’t ready to fully convert. It could also mean optimizing individual landing pages to offer conversion opportunities to all demographic groups simultaneously, though this is admittedly trickier to pull off.
It’s going to take time for you to understand the full context of each micro conversion you analyze. There’s almost no way to tell exactly how valuable a micro conversion is until you’ve spent a few weeks gathering data on converted users. But once you have this information, you’ll be in a much better position to optimize your landing pages effectively.
With this information, you can optimize your ads, your landing pages, and your other materials for appropriate users. You can create entire campaigns of ads for people in the earliest research phases of their decision-making process and create landing pages that are optimized to maximize micro conversions – and tweak those micro conversions to maximize their likelihood of leading to a full conversion.
Spend a few weeks gathering data on users early in your sales funnel and those willing to engage with your brand on a temporary or limited basis. You can do this while simultaneously pursuing your traditional conversion optimization goals. Once you gather enough information, you can start making more meaningful tweaks to your campaign.
If you swap out a piece of premium content with another, does that increase or decrease your micro conversion rate? What effect does it have on eventual conversions? What happens if you split your landing page into two different versions with two different goals? Does this landing page work better for a different keyword or group?
While not as financially impactful or behaviorally meaningful as traditional conversions, micro conversions are an important consideration for your Google PPC ad campaigns – and they’re definitely worth tracking and optimizing for.
After a few adjustments in the back end of your PPC campaign, you’ll be able to get more transparency into the subtler, yet measurably valuable little interactions taken by your users. And with that data, you can make your campaigns more effective in countless different ways.
Of course, tracking KPIs and optimizing PPC campaigns is a lot of work, especially if you don’t have much direct experience with managing PPC ads in the past. That’s why agencies like PPC.co – exist; we’re here to make things easier for you. Contact us for a free consultation today!
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