Google Ads have just made it much easier to get a handle on campaign metrics and optimisation. Access to a unified timeline correlating performance and change history, and the platform’s new ‘Explanation’ function have simplified collation and assessment of reporting data and made PPC campaign goals more easily attainable.
Getting a clear picture of the fluctuations in performance over time is vital for online advertisers looking to finesse their campaign strategy, but, given the multitude of metrics and reporting factors, it is not always easy to get to the specific reasons for modulations in page impressions or conversion rates, and thus more challenging to respond as rapidly and confidently as desired. Recent improvements to the Google Ads account interface have made this understanding much more easily available, allowing the upfront correlation of performance changes and campaign updates in a single timeline. Additionally, the new ‘Explanations‘ feature from Google Ads offers likely reasons for shifts in campaign performance with much more precision and clarity than previously.
While close monitoring is essential to increase returns and maintain customer engagement, keeping track of multiple reports and timelines can be challenging and time-consuming. What campaign managers really want is the most accurate and predictive explanation for user engagement, but sometimes its not even clear where to look and start digging for explanations. The ‘Change history’ feature on Google Ads can correlate changes to budgets, assets and targeting with performance data in a single view, over a defined historical time range.
Seeing a significant rise or fall in their search impressions or conversion rate, marketers will want to know why. Diagnosing the reasons for these changes are key to the optimisation of marketing strategy. Now they need only look up their campaign timeline, where alterations in performance over time visually correlate to the factors that may have influenced them in the campaign’s history. In this way it is possible to see the correlations and likely causes of performance fluctuations. Making the appropriate updates and improvements to strategy then becomes much easier to achieve with proper precision and confidence.
Additionally, since December 2019, users can request explanations from Google Ads for major performance changes in the same interface with a single click. This function presents the user with tables of ad groups in time comparison mode, allowing, at a glance, cross-checking of the impact associated with factors such as bid changes, bid modifier changes, budget changes, budget allocation, budget exhaustion rate, eligibility, change history, targeting changes, auction completions and search interest.
The ‘Explanations’ feature is currently in beta and its functionality will expand more over time. At present the feature is limited to explanations for campaigns using manual bidding or enhanced CPC. Explanation requests are currently available only for significant changes over contiguous periods during the most recent 90 days of the campaign.
