Paid Search Performance | Example Analysis
What business question am I trying to answer?
I have been asked to produce more media conversions with my paid search ads but with the same budget. I need to evaluate which of my campaigns are successfully providing conversions at a low cost and which are not so I can reallocate some of my budget.
What metrics from this product help you answer that question?
I need to use campaign, cost, clicks, cost per click, media conversions, and media conversion rate.
What visuals from the dashboard tell this story?
First I will evaluate my KPIs to see overall how I am doing.
Observation #1
I have spent around $30.4k for ~2,000 conversions overall. Across all my campaigns, I'm average $0.41 per click with a conversion rate of 2.7%. But let's see if we can see which campaigns are performing better than others.
Observation #2
Next, I will get an overall view of campaign performance with my Performance Metrics bar graphs. I turn my data labels on at the top right of the visual to get a quick glance of anything that stands out.
I see that Campaign 4 cost the most, but it isn't providing the highest return on clicks or media conversions.
Campaign 2 has a quite large share of the total clicks, and is my second highest for media conversions. Furthermore, Campaign 2 isn't in the top campaigns by cost, so I definitely want to take a closer look to see what the cost per click and conversion rate are for Campaign 2.
Lastly, Campaign 21 has the highest conversion rate, so I want to look at it more closely as well.
Observation #3
I click each of these three campaigns to get a more detailed analysis.
Campaign 4 has a cost per click of $4.33, which is fairly high, but it has a click-through rate of 5.7%, which is higher than my average. But that $4.33 seems so much higher compared to my average of $0.41. Let's keep going with my other two campaigns.
I click Campaign 4 to unselect it and select Campaign 2.
Now I see a cost per click of $0.04, much lower than Campaign 4. And I also see a click through rate of 43.4%, definitely way higher than Campaign 4.
Lastly, I unselect Campaign 2 and select Campaign 21.
Here I see a cost per click of $3.22, which is much higher than Campaign 2, and a click through rate of only 2.2%.
Observation #4
Now I have some critical analysis to do. It seems like I might want to drop Campaign 21 with that high cost per click, but let me take a closer look at my conversion rate. For Campaign 21, 99% of the individuals who click this ad convert, so it's definitely a campaign I want to remain invested in. For comparison, Campaign 2 has a conversion rate of 0.7%; so while the cost per click is cheap, the conversion rate is incredibly low.
Observation #5
Finally, I'm going to zoom back out and look at all of my campaigns together in the data table.
If I look at my conversion rates, Campaign 21 and Campaign 4 actually have the highest conversation rates by far. Campaign 8 also appears to be doing well at 6.7% conversion rate.
Returning back to campaign 2, the conversion rate is lower, but it has also provided me with the second highest number of conversions at 451.
Recommendation
- Reallocate some of the budget from lower performing campaigns (such as campaign 7 with 0 conversions at a cost of $8.03 per click and campaign 26 with 1 conversion at $4.00 per click) to Campaigns 2, 4, and 21.