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PPC commentary
I’m having bit difficulty in writing and presenting insights in my PPC job. My supervisor and other people with PPC experience always keep saying ‘provide the reasoning of insights’ or ‘what’s the story behind it’
But how do I do that? If demand is less than our cost will drop etc. And I can’t write long essays in PPC because its all factual obviously.
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1 Reply
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Just ask yourself “why did this happen?”
Example: We got less clicks month over month even though we spent $1,000 more. Why? Because average CPC increased 100%.
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They are telling you to focus less on the quantitative and more on the qualitative. We all see the reports and see the deltas up or down , so rehashing them in written format is redundant.
This is where the rubber meets the road for us. What market conditions are impacting the account? Is it B2B and now it’s summer and leads are down while costs are up? Why is that? Could it be because we broke the all time air travel record on June 30? Are we fully out of the Covid Economy now?
What about home sales? Are interests rates impacting housing affordability? What about inventory? Seasonality?
What about an account that was all video and display and you just rebuilt it to Search. How is the funnel changing given the differences in the fundamentals of high intent search versus carpet-bombing display, are you seeing higher CTR’s? Conversion rate going up? Take this opportunity to highlight how you were correct to rebuild the account and your now delivering value to Mr. Client.
These are just 3 examples off the top of my head.
Good reporting includes this:
Work Log
Active/Completed Test Results
Qualitative analysis of reporting
Next steps/ temperature check/ confirm next check in date
I hope this helps explain some examples of what your boss is looking for. Please feel free to ping me for additional questions.
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Your agency should be training you on this and helping you learn this skill. It is not something most people just have naturally.
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> because its all factual obviously
Well, it’s obvious to you, but your clients are dumb as bricks 5 year olds. You’ve got to explain it to them like they are dumb as bricks 5 year olds.
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Results moving in the right/wrong direction? What optimisations did you do or account changes did you make that affected the results? Can you quantify it fully?
If not, could seasonality be a factor – has search interest or behaviour changed?
Are there other market forces at play that could distort performance – take a business view? Are other channels trending the same way as ppc? If they are it’s likely a wider market effect. What may be driving it?
Has the competitive environment changed? Are your cpcs getting forced higher?
Are there changes in funnel conversion rates – where and why? Signals that something has changed in the site or some part of the funnel may be broken.
Paid search can give great signals of changes in the marketplace and business, and if you can dig in and provide answers to the above points then this is the start of a narrative you can weave around the numbers and create that ‘story’.
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>I’m having bit difficulty in writing and presenting insights in my PPC job. My supervisor and other people with PPC experience always keep saying ‘provide the reasoning of insights’ or ‘what’s the story behind it’
We call what you’re doing “reading the weather” at my company.
At the end of the day, the numbers themselves are not as important as why the numbers are what they are. If you are in a meeting and say things like “we got 30,000 impressions which is 7,000 more than the month prior. Our impression share was 63%, which is down from 72% month over month” you’re going to bore the shit out of who you’re presenting to. If they don’t know anything about SEM then you’re just telling them random numbers that has no impact on how they can make decisions about their business, and if they do know about SEM then they can read it faster than you can say it, making it redundant.
>But how do I do that? If demand is less than our cost will drop etc. And I can’t write long essays in PPC because its all factual obviously.
*Why* is demand less? *What* happened that caused the demand drop? Was it users in a specific area? Time of day? Did the market competition increase causing IS to drop?
You need to be explaining to your stakeholders the why behind the numbers and give actionable insights. What need to be done to improve the performance?
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This is the one the I struggle with the most in my job – I’m here for advice too.
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They’re asking you to report on “why” something happened not “what” happened. Anybody, even without a braincell is able to see what happened and what the numbers look like. The analysis and insight comes from the question “why do these numbers look like this?”
Going deeper, if the question could be asked from a commercial point. It’s a key skill that does set apart really good marketing people from mediocre. It’s a skillset I drive into any junior from day 1.
It’s hard to really hard to train anybody in this form of reporting from simply typing on Reddit, however if you would like, and have a means of contact such as discord, feel free to DM me and I can look to assist over a call.
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I think the easiest approach is to always ask yourself the following three questions, what’s happened, why and how are you addressing it. Always tie commentary back to the business objectives.
So rather than just state top line numbers look for the why, for example if conversion rates rose following optimisations, what were said optimisations and how are you going to take advantage of this going forward, what further tests could you run etc. if cpc’s have suddenly risen, has the auction suddenly intensified and whose being more aggressive. What actions could be taken to address this?
Fundamentally you should be receiving training in this.
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Following
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It’s mostly the art of bullshitting. You say what your client wants to hear, in a fancy way.
A mental model that helps sometimes is STAR – situation, task, action, result. Connect the dots with words and metrics.
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Most of the clients I have encountered were not very concerned about the *why* and *how*. They mainly wanted actionable insights, regardless of the positive or negative scenario.
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I’m in the same boat as you and currently working on this area. I struggle with it a lot. Two things my managers stress to me is you want to point out what the client can’t see by just looking at your charts and data.
So for example, instead of saying conversions increased MoM. You can say, we moved more budget to x campaign which saw CPL improve from x to x. This impacted the bottom line positively.
The second thing is you want to remember is to look at what improved that had the largest impact on the account, and then drill down further. For example, looking into whether certain ad groups or keywords improved, or comparing from one month to the other month your top converting or clicked searches. Maybe you see a pattern like there was more searches with that were variant matches that were worst than searches that exactly matched your keywords.
This blog post from Avinash Kaushik explains, hopefully it helps you. I know it’s helping me a little bit. Hopefully I can look back at this sooner than later as one of the things that helped me finally do reporting right. https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/winning-with-data-say-no-to-insights-yes-to-out-of-sights/
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“It’s all factual obviously” only to you because you spend days in and out on the account. They barely look at it.
People you deal with have the attention span of a goldfish, so you need nicely presented data so that they understand the basics at a glance, like colour red bad colour green good, big important small not so important.
Don’t go into detail unless they ask you to, or make sure you announce you’re digging further into a particular problem because (…) and (…), and conclude with the solution (whether it’s been or being looked at, people want answers, not an open question).
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This is something i also struggle with in my job too. I provide performance notes weekly to my team lead & just last week i was told the same thing. I’m new to this agency (been here since January), and I’m so new to search. I haven’t done search previously before coming here, so once i was put on this account as the only person doing search i was scared.
Learning day by day and getting better, though.
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