PPC advertising has been around for almost as long as companies have been selling on the Internet. Despite being eclipsed by newer, flashier tactics — not to mention entirely new ways of reaching prospects online — it remains a critical digital marketing tool for many eCommerce sellers. Yet even now, misperceptions around PPC ad campaigns abound.
Smaller sellers, who don’t have the resources to hire full-time marketing staff or retain blue-chip digital marketing firms, rarely have the time or expertise to learn the ins and outs of PPC advertising, let alone keep up with the space’s ever-changing technical and tactical landscape.
Measuring PPC Ad Campaign Performance
If you run PPC ad campaigns to drive traffic and leads to your eCommerce portal, you already know that you can’t simply initiate a campaign, sit back, and wait for the revenue to roll in.
PPC is not a hands-off strategy. It requires constant attention, frequent iteration, and most importantly, a scalable system for measuring it all. This is an overwhelming thought for sellers who don’t consider themselves marketing experts.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a marketing expert to effectively measure your PPC ad campaigns’ performance. You only need the right tools to help you make sense of it all. Tools intuitive enough for people without extensive PPC campaign management experience to understand, yet powerful enough to produce unique, actionable insights that help you get more out of your campaigns.
Tools like Optmyzr are a comprehensive solution that helps PPC advertisers develop, run, and optimize high-performance campaigns. Optmyzr handles the nuts and bolts of PPC campaigns, from audits to budget tracking to data sharing between apps — slashing the amount of time some users devote to campaign management in half.
Optmyzr is particularly useful for advertisers using Google’s new-ish Performance Max (PMax) campaigns, a next-generation PPC marketing tool that’s both more powerful and also potentially more bewildering than anything that came before it. Backed by a team experienced in running and optimizing PMax campaigns, Optmyzr delivers insights, automations, and tactical support.
Performance Max Is a Powerful eCommerce Marketing Tool (If You Use It Correctly)
Performance Max is a goal-based campaign tool that knits together your entire Google Ads ecosystem, helping you find and convert customers on disparate channels like YouTube, Gmail, and Search. It utilizes Google marketing automation technologies like Smart Bidding and budget optimization to support the specific advertising goal(s) you set. It combines Google’s powerful understanding of user intent with audience signals and other data you provide to help you reach new customer segments and optimize your sales funnel for higher conversion.
Optmyzr also integrates seamlessly with data from top eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce, Shopify, and WooCommerce.
Despite Google’s insistence that Performance Max offers straightforward “asset reporting [that] can help you understand which creatives are impacting performance” and “new insights [that] can help you understand changes in performance and inform your broader business strategy,” Performance Max outputs can be difficult for non-experts to interpret and often appear incomplete.
If you’ve tried Performance Max campaigns with an open mind, but aren’t getting the results you expected and can’t figure out why, don’t give up.
Optmyzr Offers Unmatched Performance Max Insights
The Optmyzr Performance Max diagnosis guide showcases Optmyzr’s deep expertise with this powerful but often misunderstood tool. For PPC advertisers that don’t yet work with Optmyzr, it’s a great introduction to the sorts of insights the company offers and a self-evident display of its value.
The guide opens with a comprehensive overview of common issues that can impact PPC ad campaign performance in a nonspecific context (that is, those affecting Performance Max and non-PMax campaigns):
- Issues affecting conversion tracking, such as changes in site source code and Google Ads errors
- Campaign parameter changes, particularly in the budget, bidding, and/or Asset Group/Listing Group
- Issues with Google Merchant Center
- Issues with your product feed
- Changes to your eCommerce site, even minor ones affecting navigation, plugins, checkout flows, and product content
- De-indexing or incomplete indexing of tracked pages on Google Search Console
- Changes in search trends or volume around your products
- Changes to other marketing campaigns that may impact PPC campaign performance, such as social, email, affiliate, and third-party remarketing
- Changes to non-PMax campaigns within the Google ecosystem, such as Display, YouTube, and Search campaigns
It follows this with an extensive treatment of issues specific to Performance Max, such as:
Google bidding shifts
When an individual ad slot shows multiple products, each product records an impression, so longer-duration views may log several impressions. However, the campaign and Asset Group report just one impression, regardless of the actual number.
Performance metric outliers
An array of what Optmyzr calls “diagnostic and micro-volume metrics” offers insights into what’s behind sudden changes in campaign performance. These include click-through rate (CTR), the average cost per click (CPC), impressions, conversion rate, value per conversion, and cost per conversion.
Situation-specific cause
Often, the culprit for significant PMax campaign performance changes is situational: automated rules that made changes to the account, data exclusions were incorrectly applied or not applied at all, developers made changes to the account without notifying the account holder, and so on. Optmyzr can uncover issues that even seasoned marketers overlook.
Optmyzr ties it all together with a 44-point diagnostic checklist. This checklist makes it easy to systematically review your PMax campaign performance and pinpoint the issue. Or at least figure out the next questions to ask.
Of course, even the most comprehensive guide can’t answer every single question that comes up in the context of a Performance Max PPC campaign. But Optmyzr clearly offers value few PPC campaign solutions can match. For eCommerce advertisers frustrated by the feeling that they’re leaving something on the table, that’s worth celebrating — and leveraging.
